Sambhav

The following article appeared in The Times of India, Mumbai edition on April 27, 2008. The original article is available at this link.

Aragtag train of children runs through the gullies of a tight settlement, badgering a drum and issuing an invitation: ‘Natak Natak. Motu Natak. Nanu Natak.’ They sidestep titanic cows grazing on dry milk packets, and matriarchs supervising the formulation of home-made alcohol on verandas. Illicit naturally. A man loading his Bajaj scooter with plastic pouches of kitchen liquor looks up perfunctorily, then carries on loading. The procession of children gathers mass on the way until, by the time it reaches a tiled square, it is a crowd. Around 15 of them mark the stage with their slippers, shush the audience, and launch into the act. The name of the play is Savdhan, the subject child marriage, and word on their grey t-shirts is, Budhan.

Budhan is a community theatre group, born to the Chharas of Chharanagar, Ahmedabad ten years ago, and born of the ignominy and punitive lifestyle foisted on this denotified tribe since the British rule. What the British government did in 1871 by ‘notifying’ 191 tribes as ‘criminal’ through the Criminal Tribes Act, the Indian government undid by ‘denotifying’ them, but then did worse by holding them ransom to the 1959 Habitual Offenders Act.

“To label six crore Indians as ‘born criminals’ is the equivalent of calling them ‘untouchables’. Yes, we do have a history of theft, but our ancestors were cornered into crime. How did you expect our families to survive in those ghettoes the British incarcerated them in?” asks Dakxin Bajrange, cofounder of Budhan and spokesperson for the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs). Dakxin is on a bed, made temporarily lame by an accident. He is a documentary filmmaker whose subjects mainly arrive from the morass of state iniquity.

“They had to secure a permit to leave the ghetto, and return by a prescribed time,” he says about the hard youth of his elders. “My grandfather, who heard about a pretty girl in another tribal ghetto in Maharashtra, had to be accompanied by a policeman there, to marry her. When I watch films about the Jewish ghettoes in World War II, I recognise the similarities. Our ancestors were plied as bonded labour in industries and plantations for up to 20 hours a day, under the rationale that ‘legitimate’ work would reform them. Good behaviour allowed them out of the ghettoes in 1936, to a ‘Free Colony’, monitored by the British,” he says emphasising the irony with a wry smile.

Accustomed to being imprisoned, beaten, extorted and humiliated over the decades, a cumulative anger always burned in the Chharas. The educated among them were denied employment after ‘Chharanagar’ was discovered on their resumes, and earnest students were shunted from good schools. ‘Why do you need to study?’ they were taunted, ‘sell alcohol.’

Punished once by the past, and twice by a people who maliciously remember it, Dakxin and his colleagues decided it was time to jettison old associations. Their parents may have been thieves and bootleggers, but they had faith in education and set their children down that promising road (among the 12 DNTs in Gujarat, Chharas are most educated, with 100% primary literacy). The children, in turn, found clemency in learning. So when Dr Ganesh N Devy and Mahasweta Devi arrived here in 1998, ploughing the early ground for a progressive DNT policy, they asked the youth of Chharanagar what they’d like. A library, they replied. It materialised, and became their epicentre. They came here to study, and left with reformist agendas. They didn’t inherit their fathers’ crimes but they were recipients of that dramatic strain. In theatre, they found a tenable medium to transfigure friends (DNTs), chastise enemies (the police) and draw the attention of the rest to the impasse of the DNTs.

Their first performance in ‘98 announced DNTs’ first official vindication—a court verdict admitting compensation of Rs 2 lakhs to the widow of a tribesman called Budhan Sabar (from Bengal’s Sabar tribe), who died in police custody in Calcutta. The play was called Budhan. The group retained the name.

“After Budhan, there were three other custodial deaths,” remarks Budhan’s other founder, Roxy Gagdekar. His own father had succumbed to police brutality. Roxy is now a crime reporter for an English daily in Ahmedabad, but his job poses a liability. If he reports the routine police harassment in his locality, he has to accept its aftermath—revenge. “Someone down the line of my family or friends has a record for past crimes. I don’t want to invite trouble for them,” he says grimly. His contempt is subcutaneous. “Our anger finds accurate expression in the play Mujhe Mat Maro Sahab (Don’t Hit Me Sir),” he says. “It summarises all our problems.”

Two year ago they took their theatre into the lion’s den—the police academy at Karai, Gandhinagar. “We performed Mujhe Mat Maro Sahab, seething with antipolice sentiment.” remembers Dakxin. “Later in the week, seven to eight police vans drove up outside our library. We thought it was another raid, but they were academy students who had come to commiserate.” An attitude reversed, another mine defused. “Again, at Rangayana in Mysore, a police inspector approached us after a show, asking us to broker peace between the police and a DNT outside Bangalore.”

The Chharas have acquired some influential friends—Keshav Kumar, DG (CID crime branch), K R Kaushik, ex-commissioner of police and D Thara, ex-Collector of Ahmedabad. “The incidence of arrests has decreased,” says Dakxin. Public offensive has also mellowed. “Ab ye log sudhar gaye,” is the unsolicited opinion of Bipin, a rickshaw driver at Ahmedabad airport, glancing at Ravi Indrekar, the only Chhara auto driver.

Chharnagar now has the revised identity of an ‘actors colony’. Two of its fellows are products of the National School of Drama, another is a casting agent in Ahmedabad, one is studying drama at a local college, and 12-year-o1d Nitin Sekharbhai has copped a small role in an art film called Patang.

Improvisation is the order of Budhan’s theatre. Plays obtain the tangibility of a script only after an issue is examined, and vocalised by the actors, who arrive at a consensus as to what they want to say and effect. Props and sets are excess baggage, for the weight of an issue is heavy enough. “We prefer street theatre to ‘proscenium’ theatre, because it allows us to converse with the public,” says Aatish Indrekar, the drama student from Gujarat College. Aatish has the natural swagger of an actor. He gestures dramatically (flashing Dilip Kumar), and produces his sunglasses when on the street. “I want to stay a theatre actor,” he says. Most of the young people here say that. They don’t seem interested in film and television. Theatre, as they’ve learnt it at Budhan, has been their school of dissent. They have learnt the slogans couched in dialogue here and vented their wretchedness through these surrogate actions. Television may water down the gravitas.

Their oeuvre has now expanded. From police violence and discrimination, they’re throwing up opinions on teen marriages (rife in Chharanagar), new legislation (right to information), the devil of communalism and so on. All this done audaciously, yet with that chronic tremor of insecurity. Sandeep Indrekar, who played the female protagonist in an adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s Stan Dayini (The Breast Giver), was, three years ago, jailed for three months on a claim that he says, was false. Roxy was made to vacate his upper class accommodation in another part of the city because neighbours complained to the owner. Dakxin was once assaulted by the Bhadwads, a politically strong tribe, while he was photographing the golden kalash mounted on a temple during a mela in Tharad. They strapped his arms to a horizontal pole, and beat him up and threw him off the premises. “But I went back in,” he said. They all do.