Forgotten hero

Book review of Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi

Although I have been a journalist for nearly three years, the first time I heard of Safdar Hashmi was when Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan met Jawaharlal University Students’ Union President Aishe Ghosh after she was attacked by masked goons and gave her the book under review as a gift.
 
It was a thoughtful present. For a generation unacquainted with Safdar Hashmi, Sudhanva Deshpande’s book Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi, replete with hope and humour, tells us what it means to live resistance, since Hashmi’s theatre was an extension of his politics.
 
Mr Deshpande’s book begins on the fateful morning of January 1, 1989, with the attack on Jana Natya Manch (Janam) and Hashmi, then just 34 years old. Hashmi was severely beaten and left to die. A worker named Ram Bahadur was shot, just to reinforce the murderers’ message. “[Hashmi] was unconscious. There was blood all over his head, his hair dripping wet,” Mr Deshpande writes.
 
In recreating the tragedy, he also reveals the rot in the justice system. The ambulance and the police didn’t even turn up. Hashmi was transported, first by rickshaw, then a cab and finally another car.  Then he was shuttled among different hospitals, which lacked amenities to treat his wounds. On the other hand, the police failed to catch Hashmi’s attackers. They arrested a man who had approached them to report the crime instead.
 
Mr Deshpande introduces Hashmi’s wife Moloyashree (referred to as Mala in the book) and her courage in the face of tragedy. He tells us how Hashmi met Mala through theatre. It was hard to resist a smile reading about Hashmi’s failed attempt at changing his surname after they married.
 
Mala, in fact, was the driving force behind Janam re-performing Halla Bol (the street play that was being staged when Hashmi was attacked), two days after his murder. He says, “In that simple act, of leading us in a performance at the spot where her comrade and friend, the love of her life, had been felled, she, more than anyone else, captured that incandescent moment.”
 
Mr Deshpande moves on to tell us about Hashmi’s early years and the formation of Janam from Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), a dynamic all-India movement that had brought together the best performers in the anti-colonial struggles in the 1940s. Cracks within the IPTA started emerging after the Communist Party of India split in 1964. Hashmi was a part of the group that wanted to “perform more and more for the working class and farmers”. He and other young radicals were evicted from the group and went on the found Janam.
 
Mr Deshpande offers insights on the thoughts and ideas behind each of the plays Janam performed. He shows how social context was important for everything Janam did. For example,  Machine, one of Janam’s earliest plays, emerged after Hashmi learned that six workers in a factory were shot dead after they demanded parking for their bicycles and a canteen to heat their food. Hashmi also insisted that the performance space for this play had to be accessible to all classes, especially workers. Another of his plays, Aurat,  tackled the challenges women face in various spheres of life. 
 
“Safdar was a non-believer... imbued him with unshakable faith that a just world could be created,” Mr Deshpande writes. Halla Bol was a case in point. It was a clarion call against inequality and capitalism.
 
Media reports tell us that he was attacked by Congress goons because he was performing Halla Bol as part of the CPI (M) campaign for the Ghaziabad municipal elections. But Mr Deshpande —- true to his left-leaning credentials — imbues Hashmi’s death with an ideological hue. “Safdar was targeted because he put himself between his killers and his comrades in the class struggle,” he says.
 
Mr Deshpande, managing editor of LeftWord, which has published this book, is an old friend of Hashmi and that friendship permeates this account. It is not written as a conventional biography. Even after all these years, he remembers minute details such as the months leading up to the attack. In an interview with another newspaper, Mr Deshpande said, ‘The attack politicised me.” Hashmi’s killing politicised an entire generation. Maybe this book would do the same for ours, although as he points out, it might take time. 
 
Hashmi’s death and, more significantly, his life, teaches us what it means to stand up for our beliefs.

Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi

Author:  Sudhanva Deshpande

Publisher: LeftWord

Price: Rs 495