Adapted from writer and social worker Veena Verma’s story, “Mull di Tiwi”, directed by Chandigarh-based director Sangeeta Gupta, was recently staged at the Women Director’s Theatre Festival. The concluding play of the festival organised by Punjabi Academy, “Mull di Tiwi” focussed on the issues of women trafficking and the harsh realities a woman’s struggle for survival spells out in today’s Punjab.
Excerpts from an interview:
A little about what attracted you to Veena Verma’s work?
Veena Verma’s stories are mostly based on real life events. There is no fiction in her stories, and they are very real. They all contain a central truth, she just presents it as a story. I have done plays on six of her stories earlier. While most of her stories are based abroad, there are some which are based on things she witnessed when she was younger and growing up in India.
Also, the dialogues in her play ring so true, they make you believe that it is how people must have spoken in real life too. Her style of writing is also very open and true. I really like her stories and working on them.
What about “Mull di Tiwi” made you choose it?
I had read it last to last year, and prepared the script then. We had done two shows locally. It’s a play about women trafficking, and the truth is that the buying and selling women and girls is not over. The ways of trafficking have changed but it’s still very much alive. In Punjab they still get women from Bengal and in Mansa district there is a mandi held to sell and buy women.
While working on adapting a story to a play, how much creative liberty do you take?
I don’t change her stories much. I try to use mainly her language, style and story line. There are some scenes that she has written in two lines, like the bit about the kotha (brothel), so there I have taken the liberty of expanding the scene. I wanted to show what a kotha will look like, how the girls will behave, and what their body language will be. I have imagined the conversations there too, and the exchange. This is to make it more dramatic, so the play doesn’t become all narration, and isn’t boring.
Where do you see Punjabi theatre going, and how much women participation do you see in it nowadays?
Not much. Those continuously pursuing theatre are still from the older generation. The new ones do come to theatre, but want to move very quickly to movies. They don’t understand that to learn you need to spend many years. They think that one or two plays are enough to learn and then they will enter cinema. It has become a medium for them. I am talking about Chandigarh, and whether it’s Punjabi or Hindi theatre there, very few women are entering theatre to stay in it.
In the past seven-eight years, I have been seeing that among the women who come out of department of Indian theatre in Chandigarh’s Panjab University, only one or two have gone on to make their own theatre group. And those people, when they hire new artists, are asking them to sign contracts so that they stay. They have also started to pay salaries to these artists.
And has the situation improved when it comes to the audience?
Yes. Initially there used to be some 250-odd people, now when I present my plays, I get at least 1000 people. Maybe that’s why we are surviving. We can’t charge for tickets because then they ask us to pay tax, and with the theatre rents so high, after paying the tax we won’t even have enough left to pay the artists. So we keep contribution boxes and by that collection we can understand how many people are coming and contributing money.
