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By Nakul Krishna Is modern Indian theatre that attempts to 'conscientise' people about social justice issues turning real individuals into an undifferentiated mass of generic suffering-people? Are we only evoking fleeting moments of pity, rather than the outrage these issues demand?
The German playwright and poet Bertold Brecht is sometimes credited with having said that if people want only to see things they understand, they should go to the bathroom, not the theatre. It follows that a director aspiring to give a “voice to India's millions of voiceless people” would aim at just that: providing understanding. Mallika Sarabhai's Unsuni, her “physical, musical theatre piece”, provided two or so hours of guilt-tripping and hectoring instead. Based on ex-bureaucrat Harsh Mander's Unheard Voices, Unsuni is designed around five monologues that tell the stories of the “real lives of the faces and hands of the beggars knocking at our car window at the traffic light”. And the production did have some things going for it, chiefly the earnestness with which it is touring free of cost through inadequate venues with poor facilities. One lauds them for their genuinely good intentions. One is pleased and relieved to see that Sarabhai has let her actors' rough edges remain. One learns that many of their lives mirrored those of the characters they played, and so much better the performance was for it. That said, let it also be noted that the staging failed on multiple counts: blocking (messy), dialogue (contrived), music (soap opera), and dancing (unimaginative). The socially-themed lyrics to Bollywood hits – you could see Sarabhai straining to Attract the Hip Youth – were at best embarrassing (there are college street-play troupes that can do better than 'Court Mein Jaake Lado' to the tune of 'It's the Time to Disco', to quote only one example). In fact, one has seen this sort of thing before: in childhood for one, where neighbourhood do-gooders would sit one down while they filled one's head with Awareness About Social Problems. The difficulty there (and here) is with the do-gooder's peculiar attitude to these problems, which renders them the mostly private problems of unfortunate souls, their solution lying in the well-meaning interventions of concerned middle-class reformers. To elaborate the obvious, what is 'social' about social problems is that they are only symptoms of something fundamentally wrong with the societies they occur in. To deprive them of their context is a bit like missing the AIDS for the lesions. Brecht said there were times when one had to choose between being human and having good taste. Sarabhai spared the audience this choice. Unsuni pulled off the difficult feat of making true stories seem invented, turning real individuals into an undifferentiated mass of generic suffering-people. There are places where this works – in a choir, for instance, where individual voices are subsumed in a larger, collective voice that is greater than the sum of its singing parts. The unheard voices of Unsuni, however, came across as little better than pathetic. Until, that is, they caught the kindly eye of a passing bleeding heart, and there were plenty: missionaries in Ariel White, social workers, and (naturally, given the source material) bureaucrats. At its best moments, Unsuni evoked fleeting moments of pity, rather than the outrage that is the only correct and adequate response to these stories. At its worst, when Sarabhai pointed a manicured finger at the audience and their sheltered lives, the reaction was mocking laughter, the audience correctly sensing the fakeness of such a gesture, especially when followed by an appeal to their conscience (and purses). Perhaps one shouldn’t be quite as admiring of the sacrifices involved in free touring; after all, a certain willing corporate sponsor bankrolled the enterprise. It is sweet to see India’s generous corporate sector cast a glance at ‘social responsibility’, but there is obvious reason to be suspicious. Not of Sarabhai’s motives, but of the play’s impact. Despite some stray rhetoric against newly corporate India, it seems the sector is more than comfortable with this view of privatised dissent. Not for nothing was Karl Marx contemptuous of the bourgeois conscience. Hearts bleed profusely, but the structure remains untouched. The problem is this: at its heart, the play is profoundly anti-political. Successful protest, the principal means of effecting social change for the last two or three thousand years, is the collective protest of the oppressed themselves, not the prettified words put into their mouths by well-meaning writers. It is not so much that Sarabhai provides no solutions to the issues she raises, just that she provides the wrong one. She would like the Elite Youth in her audiences to emerge ‘conscientised’ (and this is different from being politicised) in a vague, and therefore harmless, sense. Let's say she succeeds and a few thousand earnest college kids do volunteer for her ‘movement’. Then, in what way does she intend for them to come out except to acknowledge that there is misery in the world, believing all it takes to end it is a bunch of helpful teenage volunteers? This is the Doordarshan theory of social change, the IAS view of revolution. May one suggest Sarabhai's audiences instead watch Cotton 56 Polyester 84, Ramu Ramanathan's much better play set in Bombay's textile union movement. Working from very similar sources (One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices, by Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar), Ramanathan manages to craft a play that respects the individuality of its characters, never sacrificing their stories to make place for the playwright's moralising. More importantly, it is stridently political, disdainful of well-intentioned wannabe-NGO-types, in favour of the emancipation of the working class by the workers themselves. Not by their oppressors' wives and children. And this happens not when pampered teenagers with an eye to their CVs feel pricks of conscience, but when the objects of their passing sympathy begin – to use the Nicaraguan guerrilla Humberto Ortega's words – to “organise, organise, organise”. (Nakul Krishna is a Bangalore-based writer and theatreperson) InfoChange News & Features, July 2007
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