The Theatre Of Protest

Can theatre be the political voice of the masses? Can it be presented as the shocked reaction and rejection of a group of performing artists to the law and the judiciary which sticks out its acidic tongue to judicial decisions in cases of abuse, rape, torture and violence against women?

“Theatre, understood to include both dramatic literature and dramatic performance, has long been used as expressing and communicating protest against injustice, exploitation and oppression by those in power as well as for creating new perceptions of reality.

The term ‘protest theatre’ is often used as a synonym for political theatre, but it has a wider scope. Socially raised theatre may raise consciousness about social ills for which individuals, and not the State, may be collectively responsible. Thus, it may not be aimed at political authority at all.” So writes Pushpa Sunder in her in-depth essay Protest Through Theatre, the Indian Experience. The most identifiable example of theatre of protest is Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House which raised a protest against women’s position in society.

Protest theatre is a form of performance art that aims to challenge social and political injustices through theatrical means. By combining artistic expression with activism, this genre seeks to engage audiences, provoke thought, and inspire action regarding pressing societal issues. It often incorporates elements of satire, storytelling, and direct audience interaction to create a powerful emotional connection and raise awareness about marginalized voices and experiences.

This has been aggressively demonstrated recently through a performance in Bengali titled Jagorone Jay Bibhabari presented at Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts under the joint collaboration of Mukhomukhi and Tritiyo Shutro. The title of the performance is the first line of a famous song composition by Rabindranath Tagore which spells out hope at the end of a dark night breaking the hopelessness contained in Life.

The width and scope of the performing space wrests this play/performance from the limitations of sound, space, music and poetry theatre is sometimes constrained by with the help of a group of very young performers, ten young women and ten young men, with live music and songs strategically used like artistically created punctuation marks in a beautiful painting.

The entire performance has been created to construct a collage from the works of eminent writers, poets, musicians and singers drawn from across the world. These includeauthors like Safdar Hashmi from whose writing we find a line from his Aurat. Or, another scathing line from Debesh Roy’s writings on the variations in time and its impact on people, (Shomoy Oshomoyer Brittanto), Nina Raine's play 'Consent', Suzy Miller's 'Prima Facie', all presenting the varied degrees and qualities the female of the human species is subjected to, individually and collectively by patriarchy, mainly by men.

The wide-ranging nature of the accusations, social conditioning, needless compulsions and lack of choice women are forced to live by are brought forth through the powerful performances by the 20 actors, the musicians, the lighting, the set design, everything. And the orchestration and symphony in everything leading to a finished product has been successfully achieved by director Suman Mukhopadhyay who has dedicated his entire life to theatre.

The play opens on a near-completely dark stage and we can see the silhouetted figures of around nine or ten young men seated on chairs right at the rear of the proscenium. This is followed by the entry of ten very young maidens, dressed in modern attire talking quite freely about their bodies, their restricted freedoms they are fully aware of but have decided to protest against.

The young men sitting behind slowly come forward and join the girls in their singing and dancing and recitation of poetry, each one an attack principally against the law and judicial machinery which has been constantly failing to punish criminals of domestic abuse, child marriage, restrictions of girls and women on moving around at night, and so on.

Playwright Nina Rein's main character says, "It happened. Believe me, it happened. It's not a fantasy. That guy raped me.” Suzie Miller points directly to the legal process, saying, "It is not possible for you males to understand the experience of sexual abuse of a girl.”

The bottom line the performance insistently points out is the disbelief in the rape victim’s description about her rape inspite of ‘disrobing’ her in a public court because she is unable to correctly and accurately recall the exact sequence of the incident and the details thereof as the very act of rape is so traumatic during and much after that it is simply not possible to be accurate for the victim in her recollections.

This writer prefers to call this a ‘performance’ chosen with the right choice of selected pieces from the works of great writers to put them together in a collage of creations that makes complete sense and never appears disjointed or forced.

This is entirely a performance-centric piece where the myriad girls and boys, all of them either on the last phase of teenage or just under 30 have acquired an incredible harmony and synchronization who seem to have been born to perform in this contemporary, post-modern and global performance. Most of them are debutants while a few are professionals on the Bengali stage.

From real incidents of rape that went unpunished, the performance brings out, in detail, the Pararia rape case of 1988, where, according to this performance, 25 women initially identified as Dalit but later learnt to be Yadav, were raped in the village by policemen. The small village of Pararia lies thirty kilometres from the temple-town of Deoghar in Bihar.

In a detailed report by Uttam Sengupta (India Today, February 19, 2013), “Villagers remember vividly the night in February when a group of policemen, assisted by home guards and chowkidars, terrorised their hamlet. The rape, the loot, the plunder the policemen indulged in had shaken the nation's conscience then.

But this year (2013) the sleepy cluster of 26-odd families has been all but forgotten. And the acquittal on March 13 2013 of the eight policemen and six chowkidars accused of mass rape, scarcely created a stir. The punishment meted out to the accused was just a year's imprisonment on grounds of wrongful confinement, using force, causing hurt and trespassing.”

Sengupta’s detailed report goes on to add: “But even more humiliating for the villagers of Pararia is the fact that the 72-page judgement casts doubts on the character of the women simply because they were poor. The judge writes: "It cannot be ruled out that these ladies might speak falsely to get a sum of Rs 1,000 which was a huge sum for them." This section is preceded by quotes from the defence counsel who argued that the raped women could not be equated with 'such ladies who hail from decent and respectable society', that they were engaged in 'menial work' and were of questionable character.

The actors’ swift change in costume, in body language, in speech patterns demanded when they switch over from being city maidens to poor and illiterate women of Pararia has to be seen to be believed.

To point out that poverty is not the only reason why women get raped and the rapists go unpunished. Jagorone Jay Bibhabari retells the story of a young, successful barrister who was raped but no punishment was meted out to the rapists sets the democratic feature of rape in India clearly. The lady journalist in the play who comes forward to help the victims with her support through the media is gang-raped by the police to be silenced.

Among the oppression, abuse and torture of women and girls the play focusses on, it is rape that finds prominence probably as an angry response to the medical student’s rape and murder in a public hospital in Kolkata in early August this year. And the rapists in most of the cases, are the police, who are men of law. This is never articulated but the message is clear.

The songs, sung in chorus by the performers, led by a very gifted singer who doubles up as one of the abused women, form the fulcrum of the performance. They belt out songs composed by internationally famous poets like Girish Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramkumar Chattopadhyay, Pete Seeger, Lady Gaga, and Biprajit. Anandrupa Chakraborty, Titli Chakraborty, Ipsita Kundu, Sramana Chakraborty, Rimil Sen, Payal Lahiri, Pinaki Chakraborty, Sumanta Das, Sayan Maji, and Suman Nandi. They all deserve a solid pat on their backs for their performance both individually and collectively.

The performance ends with the Tagore chorus from which the play draws its name, Jagorone Jay Bibhabari which is a song of hope, optimisim and courage all rolled into one. Thanks to Bilu Dutta who produced the play, Suman Mukherjee who directed it and to the entire cast and crew of this magnificent performance.

Protest theatre has roots in historical movements such as the Dada movement and the Epic Theatre developed by Bertolt Brecht, which aimed to provoke critical thinking among audiences. But in Indian theatrical history, we need not go far to look for protest theatre which began, in India, with the IPTA during India’s struggle for independence and growing through Bohurupi plays, Utpal Dutt, Arun Mukherjee, and not to forget the man above them all – Badal Sarkar.