On Stage: How The Plight Of Migrants Comes Alive In Indian Theatre

Theatre in India continues to reflect on the migrants and their social, economic, cultural, emotional and psychological plight.

As in the rest of the world, in India too, playwrights have constantly reacted to migration, whether forced or voluntary.

Theatre in India even today continues to reflect on the migrants and their social, economic, cultural and familial landscapes, and offers an understanding of their emotional and psychological plight.

Theatre, indeed, is the mirror reflecting the soul of society. Take the case of Bengali theatre, which has a long history of almost 200 years. Yet only during the tragic episode of the Partition of India did it focus on the phenomenon of migration.

In post-Independence India, most Bengali plays were largely political in nature, under the broad ideological umbrella of Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association, depicting the after-effects of the Partition of the country on its socio-economic and political life.

Theatre and migration in Bengal

It is quite difficult to isolate class-based political theatre from the depiction of the agonising existence of the forcibly evicted Hindu population from the erstwhile East Pakistan (now, Bangladesh).

A major play “Nabanna” by the famous Bengali playwright Bijan Bhattacharya, written for IPTA in 1944, narrated the ordeals of the rural population forced to migrate to Kolkata because of the infamous Bengal Famine of 1943. The protagonist is Pradhan Samaddar, a peasant in Bengal, and the play underlines the acuteness of the famine through the starvation of his family.

Partition was a curse for the people who had to bear the brunt of this political decision thrust upon them by their political masters. This was particularly so for the Bengalis and the Punjabis, as Bengal and Punjab were the two provinces divided in India’s Partition.

One of the most complex and tragic impacts of the partition was the influx of refugees to a foreign land.

“Natun Ihudi” (New Jews) by the playwright Salil Sen was first staged in Kolkata in 1951. It depicted the tragedy of an erstwhile well-to-do Hindu Brahmin family from East Pakistan which was forced to flee to India as they could not cope with the atrocities of the Pakistani bosses.

However, their real ordeal started thereafter when they became refugees.

A refugee suffers from a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or even membership in a particular social group. The central character of Sen’s play, Manoranjan Bhattacharyya, the former Sanskrit teacher in East Pakistan had lost his job as the language was banned by the government in East Pakistan. However, once a refugee in West Bengal in India, he loses his status and glory and is reduced to being a helping hand in the kitchen of a shabby hotel. All his family members face a similar crisis.

The play “The Refugee” by Asif Currimbhoy addresses the crisis of forcibly evicted people from erstwhile East Pakistan. They were forced to settle down in the border areas of West Dinajpur in West Bengal sometime in March 1971 after the talks between Pakistani President General Yahya Khan and East Bengali leader Sheikh Mujib failed.

A huge massacre of Bengali intellectuals took place in the Dhaka University Campus on the night of March 25, 1971. Thousands of frightened Bengalis were forced to flee East Pakistan and crossed the border into West Bengal.

The play starts with an interaction between a newly evicted Muslim family with the Hindu family of Prakash Sengupta, which had crossed over to India after the Partition of 1947. The healthy non-malicious relationship between the two families appears remarkable as both families had belonged to the Comilla sub-division before 1947.

However, it ended tragically when Yasin from the evicted Muslim family who was living with the Senguptas goes back to East Pakistan to join the Mukti Fouz (later called Mukti Bahini, the armed liberation movement of Bangladesh in 1971).

Partition and theatre in the West

Modern Punjabi theatre has addressed the issue of outward migration critically. It grapples with the emotional and psychological impact of leaving behind homes, families, and cultural roots.

A migrant Punjabi family faces a huge problem while navigating their new identity in a foreign land where they are less than welcome. The crisis emanating from a pseudo-belongingness to a new set is extremely difficult. The new community where the migrants arrive appears less friendly, discriminatory and even hostile. The Punjabi plays present this effectively.

The Punjabi theatre reflects the experiences of their communities both in India and in the diaspora, manifesting the agony of the migrants. The enactment of “Toba Tek Singh” and “Khol Do” by Saadat Hasan Manto are classic examples of plays on migration and Partition. They depict poignant accounts of large-scale displacement and dehumanisation of people because of the Partition.

Playwright Atamjit Singh succeeded in transforming Manto’s group of lunatics in Toba Tek Singh into living individuals in a play based on the short-story called “Rishteyan da ki Rakhiye Naa (No Man’s Land)” in 1981. He invested the inanity of the Partition with a subtle appeal to the new generation not to respect that folly. In Atamjit Singh’s Kamloops Diyan Machhian (The Fish of Kamloops River), the protagonist is a middle-class family of Punjabi immigrants in Toronto. It shows the various levels of the cultural dilemmas gripping several generations of Punjabis in Canada.

The symbolic fish in the Kamloops River in Canada make it difficult to tell whether the play is about Punjabi Canadians or Canadian Punjabis. Plays like “Gaddi Charan Di Kaahal Bari Si” explore the agonies and struggles faced by Punjabi illegal immigrants to the US and Canada.

Migration and theatre in South and North India

The Indian state which experiences the highest rate of outward migration internationally is Kerala. Thousands of Keralites migrate to the Middle East in search of jobs and presumably, a better life.

The Kerala theatre world focuses on such acts of migration. In most cases, the myth of a better life soon gets busted. The plays incorporate such tragedies as their theme.

The International Theatre Festival of Kerala presents plays on migration, oppressed migrant workers’ lives, racism and hapless refugees.

Migration within India has drawn the attention of Indian playwrights for a long time. Some of them were inspired by the play Bidesia by Bhikari Thakur, a barber by profession living in Kolkata.

In a sense, Bidesia represents the core experience of the common man in modern Bihar, with the pangs of separation resulting from the compulsions of searching for a livelihood away from home. Bidesia narrates the story of a family where a migrant husband and his wife are forced to live away from each other. The husband, a migrant worker, starts living with another woman and has children out of wedlock.

One can see, therefore, that Indian theatre – across the languages and geography of the country — has not shied away from exploring the theme of migration and has addressed the stories of migrants that address the sociopolitical and economic displacement experienced by them and its emotional and psychological consequences.

Migration has shaped Indian theatre, which has consistently tried to portray the struggle of migrants for identity, the consequences of the pull of nostalgia, and the need for adaptation to a new reality.

(Published under Creative Commons from 360info™. Read the original article here)