Remember Safdar

Deepika Padukone has been at the receiving end of praises and brickbats for turning up at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) earlier this week to express solidarity with students assaulted by armed miscreants, who breached security to enter the campus last Sunday evening. Some have accused her of using the incident to promote her new film Chhapaak — in which she plays the protagonist, an acid attack survivor. Others have said that her gesture was “bare minimum” from a celebrity at a time when the entire nation has been roiled by protests against the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act. Yet, some other — mostly supporters of the government — have called for a boycott of her new film for extending support to “anti-national” JNU.  

At the same time, a thirty-year-old video has been circulating on social media, in which Shabana Azmi uses her time on stage at 12th International Film Festival of India in January 1989 to read out a note of protest for the murder of theatre activist Safdar Hashmi. In the video, Kabir Bedi asks about her opinion of the new wave theatre director. “My views on my directors can be reserved for a later date,” she replies to a surprised Bedi, while Victor Banerjee looks on. “I choose this occasion to read out our protest,” she adds. According to some sources, senior Congress leaders — miscreants associated with the party accused of killing Hashmi — were apparently present in the audience.

Hashmi, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and founder of the theatre troupe Jana Natya Manch (Janam), was beaten up on January 1, 1989 — allegedly by a Congress mob, led by party leader Mukesh Sharma — as he and his troupe were performing their play Halla Bol! at Jhandapur Colony in Sahibabad, the industrial town of Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi. The performance was a gesture of solidarity for Ramanand Jha, a communist leader who was fighting the municipal elections in the area. Hashmi succumbed to his injuries a day later in the hospital.

Senior journalist V Kumara Swamy, in an article for The Telegraph late last year, wrote: “People talk of Safdar Hashmi as if he was a man who died at a ripe old age. …In his thick glasses, coat-muffler and wide smile, Hashmi looks much older than he actually was at the time the photograph was taken.” When he was murdered, he was only 34 years old. But he “had already made a name for himself as a fiery street theatre actor and director.” Hashmi’s fame really grew to mythic proportions after his murder. His wife, Moloyashree Hashmi, who now runs Janam, was a part of the cast that was performing Halla Bol! on the day Safdar Hashmi was murdered. She led the troupe back a couple of days later to complete the interrupted performance; the group has been revisiting Jhandapur every year since then on the day of Hashmi’s martyrdom.

Hashmi’s vision of street theatre was utopian and internationalist. In an essay outlining the vision of Janam, he noted: “Street theatre, as we know it today, is not more than fifty or fifty-five years old. It began with a short play by Mayakovsky — Mystery-Bouffe — during the 1917 revolution in Russia. During the Second World War, the same play was performed more than a thousand times in front of the troops of the Red Army. Street theatre in the Soviet Union has been closely related to the growth of people’s movements. In China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam, street theatre has been nurtured in the cradle of the Communist party. In Africa, street theatre has been the mouthpiece of nationalist movements. In the US, underclass African Americans have used street theatre to propagate their aspirations. In India too, street theatre has been closely related to the struggle for Independence. But even after Independence, our society is deeply afflicted with class hierarchy, social injustice and improper distribution of wealth.” 
 

The aim of his theatre was to attack these injustices.

In another article for The Telegraph, Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes: “Hashmi was too astute a student of history and too perceptive an observer of the social and economic realities of his time to not realise that given the existing character of the Indian ‘system’, violent confrontation with the propertied and the privileged would amount to a battle lost before it had even begun. That, in spite of his sagacious understanding of conditions on the ground, violence visited him the way it did carries a lesson immersed in sadness and irony. In a sense, Hashmi’s was a death foretold, both moving and enlightening.”

Other writers, artists and activists have been murdered since Hashmi’s death in India by political parties of all persuasion, from the far Right to the far Left. One is almost immediately reminded of the murders of Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar, M M Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh in 2013-14 by a shadowy right-wing organisation. In recent times, it has also become very fashionable to call people “anti-national” if they are critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government or its policies. But, if Hashmi’s death has taught us anything, it is that no amount of bullying, even murder can silence artistes or their ideas. One can perhaps take hope from it in our dark times. 

Every week, Eye Culture features writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance, film and sport