SAHMAT – 20 Years 1 SAHMAT 20 YEARS 1989-2009 A Document of Activities and Statements 2 PUBLICATIONS SAHMAT – 20 YEARS, 1989-2009 A Document of Activities and Statements © SAHMAT, 2009 ISBN: 978-81-86219-90-4 Rs. 250 Cover design: Ram Rahman Printed by: Creative Advertisers & Printers New Delhi Ph: 98110 04852 Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust 29 Ferozeshah Road New Delhi 110 001 Tel: (011) 2307 0787, 2338 1276 E-mail: [email protected] www.sahmat.org SAHMAT – 20 Years 3 4 PUBLICATIONS SAHMAT – 20 Years 5 Safdar Hashmi 1954–1989 Twenty years ago, on 1 January 1989, Safdar Hashmi was fatally attacked in broad daylight while performing a street play in Sahibabad, a working-class area just outside Delhi. Political activist, actor, playwright and poet, Safdar had been deeply committed, like so many young men and women of his generation, to the anti-imperialist, secular and egalitarian values that were woven into the rich fabric of the nation’s liberation struggle. Safdar moved closer to the Left, eventually joining the CPI(M), to pursue his goal of being part of a social order worthy of a free people. Tragically, it would be of the manner of his death at the hands of a politically patronised mafia that would single him out. The spontaneous, nationwide wave of revulsion, grief and resistance aroused by his brutal murder transformed him into a powerful symbol of the very values that had been sought to be crushed by his death. Such a death belongs to the revolutionary martyr. 6 PUBLICATIONS Safdar was thirty-four years old when he died. Those years, during which he had initially tried to find himself in an academic career, eventually encompassed an intense period of revolutionary activity when circumstances and a maturing inclination brought together an early interest in theatre and a growing political commitment. They were years of political theatre, street theatre, and finally the growth of the Jana Natya Manch (Janam) into a forum for evolving a conception of an alternative people’s theatre and culture. The goal of strengthening bonds of democratic unity among creative artists had been an important focus of Safdar’s aesthetic and political activities during this period. That it should have been achieved so significantly through his death and through the solidarity surrounding the activities of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, has sustained and strengthened the resolve of those who uphold the values and objectives that Safdar has come to symbolise. SAHMAT – 20 Years 7 ooking back over twenty years from the vantage point afforded by Sahmat’s position today in the Lcultural landscape, is all about recognising a scenario of momentous change. Many of the creative individuals who lent the cultural scene a depth and resonance then, have passed on. In Kaifi Azmi and Bhisham Sahni, Sahmat has lost two mentors who could always be relied upon for wise counsel when most needed. Others have withdrawn from active production and political engagement as the years take their toll. Yet several more have come in with their own concerns and commitments, to enrich the domain of cultural endeavour. And all through, we who have been associated with it would like to believe, Sahmat has remained constant in terms of its basic mission, standing up for creative freedom and cultural autonomy as values central to the realisation of a true democratic order. There may have been contingent disagreements between us as individuals associated with Sahmat, but the record of the platform as reflected in this volume, has been one of steadfast commitment to principle. This volume brings together all the statements issued by Sahmat over the last two decades. These are statements that between them constitute, with forgivable gaps and omissions, a retrospect on the evolving scenario of cultural production and its social and political environment. The modes of dissemination of these statements has spanned the rapidly changing technological formats of the last two decades: from word of mouth and conventional mail, to internet and the e- mail. Sahmat has also depended on the media, or at least those sections that can be reliably counted on to stand up for shared values. We recognise that the media has over these two decades, acquired various mutant forms and shapes. But Sahmat, we believe, has remained constant. 8 PUBLICATIONS Sahmat came into existence early in 1989, as a spontaneous gesture of solidarity by the cultural community after Safdar Hashmi, one of our best and brightest was killed most brutally by political hooligans. A government was in power then with an unassailable parliamentary majority, but highly infirm political convictions. As Sahmat came into existence, the Ayodhya controversy was just beginning to ascend to a new plane of violence, with ritual mobilisations by the Hindutva combine in various parts of the country sparking off savage bouts of communal rioting. Ayodhya has cast a long shadow over the country’s recent history. And it has been, in terms of its various ramifications, a central concern of Sahmat’s two decades. Within weeks of the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, Sahmat organised a day long music festival, Anhad Garje, that brought together on one platform the best of the practitioners of the Sufi and Bhakti traditions from India and abroad. It was an affirmation by the entire cultural community of the broad and rich traditions of India, their openness, diversity and tolerance of all faiths. Set against a background of strident majoritarianism and the opposite, defensive reaction of minorities who were tending then to shrink into a cocoon, this was a call for transcending the narrowness that competitive communalism invariably induced. This pursuit of all that is authentic in Indian culture and tends by that virtue to unite rather than sunder communities, took Sahmat to Ayodhya in August that year. Choosing the symbolic day of August 9, anniversary of the Quit India resolution that inaugurated the climactic phase of the country’s freedom struggle, Sahmat inaugurated a cycle of cultural programmes all over the country. The best of India’s musicians, theatre artistes, painters, acedemics and others gathered at Ayodhya, for Mukt Naad,symbolically lifting the siege of the historic city by Hindutva forces. SAHMAT – 20 Years 9 The visual and thematic backdrop to these cultural programmes was an exhibition titled Hum Sab Ayodhya, depicting the geographical, historical, religious, architectural and cultural evolution of the site, with all its resonances in Indian history. The exhibition was the outcome of a unique collaboration among India’s most eminent historians, who worked closely with design experts to put up a visual and textual narrative of great richness. Within three days of its opening, the exhibition was attacked by Hindutva squads, which systematically ripped up and shredded several panels. A scurrilous rumour was floated that the exhibition had questioned the very nature of the relationship between the main protagonist of the Ramayana epic and his consort. Security personnel on duty at the venue of the exhibition stood aside and watched as Hindutva vigilantes carried out their mission of destruction. The incident resounded through the halls of India’s parliament, though not in the manner that most right-thinking people would have expected. One after the other (though with exceptions that we remember with gratitude) parliamentarians who should have known better, stood up to distance themselves from the theme of exhibition, buying into the outrageous fiction that it featured a poster depicting an incestuous relationship between Ram and Sita. In all good faith, Sahmat invited the said individuals to visit the exhibition which had by then been put up at a prominent venue in Delhi, only to be met with a furious or at best embarrassed rejection. Those were perhaps the most trying moments of Sahmat’s two-decades, with the Delhi police shutting down the exhibition, seizing all its material and filing charges against us for “promoting enmity between different groups on account of religion” and deliberately raising issues hurting “religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs”. It took eight long years for this particular millstone to fall from Sahmat’s shoulders. But when it came, vindication was 10 PUBLICATIONS resounding and unequivocal. The Delhi High Court in July 2001 held that the stated basis on which the exhibition was banned in Delhi showed “that there was no application of mind by the authority concerned”. The authorities had in other words, merely functioned as “a rubber-stamp” and had failed to make out even a semblance of a case for their strong-arm action. Sahmat had won a notable victory, but by then we had got used to the idea that the most well-reasoned judicial ruling was unlikely to be a deterrent to the determined pursuit of the communal agenda. The tide of intolerance was rising and if at one time the Babri Masjid had been the singular focus of the communal mobilisation against history and culture, the choice of targets after that structure was effaced, became more dispersed and unpredictable. A pattern soon emerged. Creative individuals who had explored new vistas and challenged hidebound conventions were in a broad sense, the targets. If they happened to possess names that suggested rootedness in any of the minority faiths, they were likely, the first in the line of fire. In October 1996, M.F. Husain, India’s most eminent living painter – then as now – was charged by the authorities in Maharashtra, under the same sections of law that had been invoked against Sahmat just over three years before. An exhibition featuring his work in Ahmedabad was attacked and many important works of art – both his and others’ – destroyed.