Urdu Academy, Delhi deserves accolades for featuring works of India’s two versatile creative personalities – Begum Qudsia Zaidi and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas – at its 26th Drama Festival which ended recently at Shri Ram Centre. As a part of their birth centenary celebrations, the festival revealed new meanings, freshness and social concerns in the works of these pioneers of modern Indian culture.
In the first part of the festival an enthusiastic audience witnessed the works of Abbas. A prolific writer, Abbas was an artist of many parts. He was a fiction writer, filmmaker, journalist and dramatist endowed with humanist vision. In his works there are undercurrents of the protest against exploitation and need to create a secular, democratic and socialist society. Closely associated with Progressive Writers’ Association and Indian People’s Theatre Association, he was the pioneer of the Hindustani theatre movement and his play “Zubeda” was immensely popular during the heyday of the IPTA movement. In the words of Mulk Raj Anand, ‘…he (Abbas) tried to create almost a new form of drama very akin to the living newspaper.” It would have been truly a rewarding experience if Zubeda had featured at the festival. However, the stage adaptation of his short stories revealed his intellectual, moral and social concerns that enriched us emotionally and enhanced our awareness about social and political malaise.
Adapted by M. Sayeed Alam from “Letar Fraum Child to Mahatma Gandhi” as “Angrezi Ki Ghalatiyon Se Bhare Khat”, it is presented by Pierrot’s Troupe. At one level, the play exudes the innocent world of children and at another level it is a critique of society plagued by communal animosity. Abbas has conveyed these serious issues through a style of comedy tinged with pathos. The main source of comedy is the wrong use of English by a child who writes a letter to Gandhi with a heart filled with sorrow and remorse.
Director Sayeed Alam has conceived the production as a solo dramatic presentation. The protagonist is Anwar Ali who writes letter on behalf of his friends who believed Gandhi died because they have not stopped playing ‘Hindu Sena – Pakistani Fauj’. The protagonist beseeched him to come from heaven and promising that his friends would not play the games that smack communalism. In a subtle way the play indicts the adults for infecting the psyche of children with their communalised worldview.
Ahmad Omair as Anwar Ali creates the portrait of his character that touches the audience, establishing a perfect rapport .
One of the oldest theatre groups of Delhi, Three Arts Club presented “Abbas Ke Do Rang”, the stage version of two short stories by Abbas. Produced by Anuradha Dar and directed by Amitabh Shrivastava who has been associated with Devendra Raj Ankur’s Kahani Ka Rangmanch movement. Blending physical movements, choreographic patterns and music, the performers enacted the story about three generations and their ideological conflict that remains unresolved. The grandfather is a landlord. His son revolts against him and joins the freedom movement. Later, he turns into an opportunist and joins the rank of exploiters to amass wealth. Now it is the turn of the grandson, who was once inspired by his grandfather’s ideal, to wage war against the father’s rank opportunism. The grandson is now a revolutionary, confronting his opportunist and exploiter father, organising mass movement against the anti-people ideology of the father.
Through a number of stage-composition marked by uninterrupted flow imbued with energy the story is told effectively. The concluding part of the production deals with the disturbing issue of the communal riots in Mumbai in the wake of Partition. The protagonist is a writer who is shocked and pained to see a society at war against itself. Unable to stop communal frenzy, in desperation he goes to the caves of Ajanta with his girl friend to have some peace of mind. Almost in a surrealistic state of mind, he perceives an artisan with hammer and chisel, cutting and shaping stone, who tells the writer that he has been doing it for years to achieve excellence. It dawns on the writer that the creation of a harmonious society needs hard, sustained and prolonged human efforts. With new energy the writer goes back to Mumbai and restarts his work to bring sanity in society. The subtle lighting design by Raghav Prakash transformed the Ajanta cave scene into intense poetic imagery. (In fact, Abbas admired the theatrical work being done by the Three Arts Club. He had written a letter of appreciation after it completed 25 years of its “uninterrupted theatrical activities” on Feb 3, 1968).
The second part of the festival was devoted to Begum Qudsia Zaidi who was committed to evolve a distinct theatre idiom. To achieve this objective, she formed the Hindustani Theatre in Delhi in the ‘50s in collaboration with M.S. Sathyu , Habib Tanvir and Monica Mishra, who later married Habib. A social activist, writer and theatre artist, Zaidi continues to be remembered for her highly imaginative adaptations of foreign plays to Indian cultural and social ethos, breathing fresh air to these works reflecting Indian sensibility. Zaidi had adapted nearly 20 plays by Kalidasa, Bertolt Brecht, Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen.
Presented by Living theatre group, “Jaan Haar” which is scripted by Zaidi, is a tragic love story of a tawaif and a young man belonging to feudal aristocracy. The play is an adaptation of French novelist Alexandre Duma’s novel “Camille”.
Directed by Sheikh Khairuddin, the play is aptly designed with the device of multi-coloured long pieces of fabric. The use of the song set to Thumri and Dadra reinforces the sad and melancholic mood in the production. Indicting feudal values, it illustrates that in such a society true love culminates in tragedy. The production evokes profound mood of pathos and compassion.
Adapted to Urdu from Thomas Brandon’s English play “Charlie’s Aunt”, “Khalid ki Khala” is popular with theatre groups in Delhi. Mask Players Art Group under the direction of Chander Shekhar Sharma presented at the festival was eminently hilarious. Shekhar has skillfully explored the comic situations as well as the character of the man in the guise of female. The handling of the twists and turns is swift and comic enough to evoke laughter. Jitender Gupta as Sibtain infatuated by the man in female guise and Himmat Singh Negi in the guise of the female give commendable performances as comic actors.
