How do we even talk about Kashmir? It is a question gnawing on the collective conscience of youngsters, especially those in the collegiate theatre circuit who cannot help but be stirred up by the billowing student movements around them and almost passing them by, because they are also encouraged to be unquestioning and apolitical. The powers-that-be have increasingly begun to characterise dissent as seditious and protest as deviance. One might have seen this coming a mile away, but it takes us by surprise each time, but mere outrage has lost its bite in these times of easy scandal.
Narratives and counter-narratives
In January, Kamala Nehru College in Delhi cancelled their street play festival because they discovered all the entries were ‘political’. It was a step derided as patently absurd on social media because what is street theatre without its activist bent and social fervour? At Crescendo, the annual cultural fest of the Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies in the capital, a staging of the Alternative Space Project’s Aksariyat Akliyat (literally, Majority Minority ) , the play on Kashmir which was part of the official fringe selection at Thespo 21, was cancelled at the last minute. According to DU Beats , an independent student newspaper, this was because “the college administration [were] apprehensive of the sensitive nature of the issue on which the play [was based].” Written by Karan Chaudhury and directed by Vivek Tyagi, Aksariyat Akliyat “takes stock of the narratives and counter-narratives that continue to colour our perspectives of the valley and its people”, and has experienced further roadblocks. A popular venue decided against programming the play because they feared their government funding would be scrapped. After just twenty-odd shows, the makers have decided to put the show on hold. Fittingly perhaps, their penultimate showing was at the teeming Shaheen Bagh, the very citadel of urban protest.
The play is not a mere simulacrum of Kashmir’s tortured past, but is often incisive and revealing of the political intrigues that led to the paradise on earth becoming the veritable abode of the damned. Chaudhury traces a timeline starting with an ‘origins’ tale from Hindu mythology — replete with demigods, devout kings and ascetics — to the advent of Buddhism with Asoka, and the growth of Islam. It lampoons British overlords and their local lapdogs. A post-Independence set-piece it tellingly includes Machiavellian impersonations of Indian leaders (Gandhi, Nehru, Patel) and the notorious Hari Singh (Abhishek Kumar Singh making a rockstar entry). It is an interlude that is as much amusing as it is ominous. Not one ‘ruler’ of Kashmir, right down to the infamous Jagmohan, comes out smelling of roses. Another significant set-piece points to the utter farce of ‘free and fair’ elections in Kashmir over decades of misrule.
Sophisticated yet raw
The play runs into fifty minutes and is modelled as a ‘platform’ piece performed on a delimited area that boxes in the actors. The devising is sometimes inspired, sometimes ordinary. There are parts presented with finesse, and also portions that are raw and rudderless. In the hands of six spirited actors — Harsh Haldani, Shrey Kaushik, Jai Vardhan Rai, Tushar Ranga and stand-outs Aryan Panwar and Singh — it does still pack a punch, and is full of the radical touches that might invite caution on the part of the casual viewer ever mindful of being in the proximity of material that could be deemed incendiary, while playing out to the refrain of ‘la illah illalah’.
An omission that stunts the play’s power somewhat are the two decades of militancy post 1989, a period that has come to characterise the valley — militancy, kidnappings, mass graves, a lost generation, documented army excesses, and international traction. This is perhaps an attempt at self-censorship in keeping with how the play’s criticism of the Indian army — via a dispassionate soldier (Panwar) — is muted in comparison to its umbrage at the state’s political leadership. From the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1989, it jumps straight to the pro-Azaadi uprising of 2008, which brought with it an army crackdown, as well as an awakening of pacifism among those jaded by a half-century of unrest.
Chilling note
Women are also conspicuously absent from this narrative — except for the imperious Indira Gandhi or the hapless Rubaiya Sayeed. The plight of the Pandits as essayed in the play seems more like a counter to whataboutery. This speaks to how left-liberal voices find it difficult to embrace right-wing narratives, even in the rare instance of those narratives being credible. Yet the complicity of Muslim locals isn’t glossed over, and remains a true blight on the so-called syncretic character of Kashmir, a mythical notion that thankfully Aksariyat Akliyat doesn’t belabour.
The piece’s timeline takes it right up to the dismantling of Section 370. Panwar doubles up as the voice of reason in the self-congratulatory milieu that step engendered. The play ends on a chilling note, by trumping up the sheer mendacity of the notion that ‘all is well’ in the valley, to the grand applause of the yes-men who populate our airwaves.
