Apna Theatre, Kanpur, 2006. Photo: Joel Lee

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Joel Lee

“It ’s the Story of Our Own Village”

A Journey in Indian Street Theater

I was thirteen hours late to my first performance by a street theater troupe. Two cars of my overnight train from Delhi had derailed, so I arrived in Gaya, in the middle of Bihar, India’s poorest and most lawless state, not in the morning as scheduled, but after sundown. Night travel in Gaya is ill-advised — the region is notorious for kidnap-ping and highway robbery — but the theater company I’d come to see was performing in a village still thirty-odd miles distant, so I pressed on. On dark roads I took the last shared auto rickshaw to a small market town, where a friend picked me up on his motorcycle and sped me to the venue. Between mango groves we turned off the road into a concrete complex, the office of a rural development organization, and parked next to a large meeting hall. Inside, a play was under way.

Slipping into the back of the room, we found a spot on the floor behind an audi-ence of about sixty women and men from the surrounding villages. Captivating their attention were ten young men in matching, baggy blue kurta-pajamas performing a play at the front of the hall. I might have missed the morning, but the actors of the the-ater troupe Prerna Kala Manch were still going strong. Their drama told the story of Badlu, a poor, illiterate laborer who uses his thumbprint as a signature for a loan — only later to find out the amount he owes is ruinously high. Swindled by the moneylender and unable to pay, Badlu is thrown in jail, where he rues his illiteracy and resolves to learn to read.

Didactic, yes. Unsubtle, certainly. But the audience laughed heartily, egging on the moneylender’s gleeful gyrations and Badlu’s woeful wails as the police drag him away. Afterward I talked with several of the women in the audience whose enthusiasm for the performance was unanimous. “Humaare hi gaaon ki baat hai,” one said — “It’s the story of our own village.”

Theater in contemporary India means completely different things to different people. To some it’s Bhavabhuti, Kalidasa, the high Sanskrit dramas of the classical age. To others it’s Karnad, Tendulkar, Rakesh, the realist drama of the modern metropolis.

Theater 38:1 doi 10.1215/01610775-2007-019© 2008 by Joel Lee

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Some think of Gujarati comedy in the air-conditioned theaters of Bombay, while oth-ers think of nautanki (a kind of folk theater) in the fields of rural Bihar. In 2006, I had the good fortune to spend six months traveling with performers of a specific tradition of Indian drama — street theater, the theater of social change. Geared toward engage-ment with the masses, performed in slums and at protests, street theater deals with social issues — injustice, inequality, human rights, the caste system. As in other parts of the world, Indian street theater is often associated with the political Left; some of its most legendary practitioners were members of the Communist Party. In the present day, social organizations of all stripes have taken it up. The three troupes with which I toured north India in 2006 represent diverse constituencies, perspectives, and tech-niques of street theater.

Bodh Gaya

The first, Prerna Kala Manch (Inspiration Art Front — PKM for short), is a team of young, working-class, Hindu and Muslim men for whom street theater is both a pas-sion and a livelihood. Supported by a nongovernmental social organization dedicated to empowerment of the poor, PKM performs plays on a wide range of social issues; according to their register book, they have given 4,500 performances of forty-two plays since their founding in 1993. They’re based in the eastern city of Benares, also called Varanasi, but the night I first saw them in action they were on tour in Bihar.

Early the next morning we were on the road, eleven of us piled into a jeep, bounc-ing along dirt roads between dusty fields of long-harvested rice paddy. It was April and already quite warm. With a lurch, we arrived at the first village, forty or so earth huts and bamboo clusters rising above the surrounding fields. The actors hopped from the jeep and split into groups — some scouted for a performance space while others unloaded the equipment. Once the location was decided, I followed the third group, the town criers. Beating drums and carrying a PKM banner, we made a round of the village as Aslam, one of the actors, announced through a scratchy megaphone in Hindi: “ALL THE WAY FROM BENARES, PRERNA KALA MANCH HAS COME AMONG YOU AND IS ABOUT TO PERFORM A KNOCK-OUT STREET PLAY! LEAVE YOUR WORK, TAKE JUST THIRTY MINUTES AND COME SEE OUR DAZZLING DRAMA IN THE FIELD IN FRONT OF KAILASH’S HOUSE! YOU WILL OBTAIN MUCH KNOWLEDGE!” We paraded through every inhabited lane of the village, meeting suspicious looks with smiles, dodging chickens, skirting impressive stacks of dried cow dung, and weaving our way on freshly swept dirt paths between cattle sheds, neem trees, and people’s single-room homes. Children attached themselves to our procession by the dozen, dancing to the drum-ming; their elder siblings, and some of the adults, followed more warily, at a distance. By the time we completed the round, a steady stream of people, led by the children, was flowing into the flat stretch of ground next to Kailash’s house, the only brick struc-ture in the village. The other actors had already rolled out the stage — a frayed six-by-

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six-foot rug — set up rugged microphones and speakers, and cleared out a space for the audience to sit.

For the next fifteen minutes, while spectators continued to drift in, the actors, now amplified, warmed up the audience by encouraging local youth to stand up and sing popular Hindi film songs while they accompanied on the tabla. When a critical mass of about 120 or 130 — mostly children and the elderly, since able-bodied adults were away at their daily wage jobs — had accumulated in a semicircle around the stage, the play began.

This time the play was Kamla ka Kamaal (Kamla’s Miracle), the story of a poor man about to marry off his adolescent daughter. A group of hijras (transvestite eunuchs, India’s “third gender”) chide him for abandoning his daughter at such an early age. He then learns that the new police inspector in town is a woman; impressed that times are changing, he decides to educate his daughter instead of marrying her off. When he announces this publicly to the patriarch of the family into which Kamla’s marriage had been arranged, an argument over girls’ education ensues and spirals into a comic brawl.

While the actors all wore the same blue kurta-pajamas throughout, their inge-nious use of a sash of the same cloth created the effect of costume changes — tied around the head, the actor looked to be a farmer; hung over the shoulders, a rickshaw puller; worn as a shawl, he was a woman or a hijra. Props were similarly spare — a bam-boo pole sufficed as a police officer’s rod, an old man’s cane, a bullock’s yoke.

The message of Kamla ka Kamaal was deadly serious — dealing with themes of child marriage, child rape, and the deprivation of girls’ education (just a few of the problems the community faces in the short and long term) — but the performance was raucous comedy. Kamla’s father, like Badlu from the previous night’s play, was por-trayed as a bumbling idiot. When the actors playing hijras pulled a successful gag, they milked it shamelessly, repeating and exaggerating the antic for more laughs while the plot receded in the background. The melee following Kamla’s father’s announcement was a carnival of slapstick that had the audience doubled up with laughter. This kind of morality play — with its free mingling of grave issues and delirious farce — was new to me, unsettling and fascinating.

Following the play, Ajay, handsome, unflappable, one of the senior-most actors in the troupe, took center stage and asked the crowd, “Kaisa laga humaara naatak? Kya samjhe isse?” (How did you like our play? What did you understand from it?) Responses were hesitant, laconic. A rail-thin man in T-shirt and lungi nervously offered: “It was good.”

An adolescent boy: “We learned something.”Ajay: “What did you learn?”A long pause. “Go on, no need to be afraid,” Ajay prodded, “tell us what you

learned.”But the boy kept quiet, and no other speakers were forthcoming. Abandoning

the attempt at group discussion, Ajay proceeded to deliver a lecture on the theme of

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the play, pausing periodically to solicit agreement from the assembled crowd. “So you’ll educate your daughters?” Some yeses, nods, grunts. “Girls, you’ll demand a full educa-tion?” A spirited “Ji han!” (Yes!) from the youth. That accomplished, the troupe swiftly packed up and returned to the jeep while Ajay and I gently deflected a barrage of invi-tations for all of us to stay for tea and a snack, or at the very least cold drinks. Despite our excuses, someone managed to produce a plate of dry biscuits before the jeep pulled away, and we all partook, vigorously munching our appreciation to our hosts through the open window before driving off.

So it went for the next two days. In a community where most of the men work as rickshaw drivers, PKM per-formed a play on the deleterious effects of alcoholism. In a shadeless hamlet on the muddy banks of a pond, a drama on dowry harassment. There was a play on corruption, another on police violence, a third on quack doctors. Another village, another social evil — and yet they were all comedies. Their newest play featured HIV/AIDS as a character — the lord of diseases, an underworld don whose henchmen are Cholera, Malaria, Yel-low Fever, and lesser illnesses (Malaria,

played by the smooth-faced actor who does most of the cross-dressing roles, stole the show). Sometimes the postplay discussion led to genuine dialogue with the community; other times, it was a sermon. Where the actors felt a particular rapport with the audi-ence, they stayed and performed a second play, lingering afterward for tea and biscuits.

Once when I asked Motilal Gupta, PKM’s energetic chief playwright, why they do street theater as opposed to stage plays or film, he replied, “Has anyone ever taken a bullet for performing on stage? No. Safdar Hashmi was shot, though, and why? Because he was doing street theater!” Safdar Hashmi, icon and martyr of Indian street theater, was performing the pro-Communist street play Halla Bol with workers in Delhi in 1989 when hired thugs of the Congress Party (rivals of the Communists) attacked his group and murdered him. In fact, Hashmi was beaten to death, not shot. “Hum naatak nahin, kraanti karte hain,” Gupta continued, “What we do is not theater — it is revolution.”

Prerna Kala Manch is the child of an unorthodox union between Gupta — a self-described rebel, troublemaker, and Hindu — and a small outpost of celibate Christian priests of the Indian Missionary Society (IMS), “the first indigenous Missionary Orga-nization of India,” according to its Web site. What the IMS Fathers in Benares share with Gupta is an admiration for Safdar Hashmi, a vision of people’s empowerment through theater, and a keen sense of the injustices proliferating under India’s rapid,

Prerna Kala Manch, Bodh Gaya, 2006. Photo: Joel Lee

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enormous economic liberalization over the past fifteen years. “In the beginning the objective was to deliver information about education, health, and basic human rights to the poor,” Father Anand, current director of PKM, explained to me in Hindi in his office, “as well as to give strength to the weaker class. Later, we began to take up the people’s own issues, the issues of the poor, which, today, are globalization, privatiza-tion, and liberalization — and how to fight against these three things.”

What I had seen of PKM’s work thus far suggested the first phase, the infor-mation crusade, theater as public service announcement. As such, Gupta’s comparison with the radicalism of Safdar Hashmi seemed unwarranted. No mainstream political party would disagree with the message of Kamla’s Miracle or Badlu Caught in the Wheat Grinder — at least not publicly. But the last play I saw PKM perform on the Bihar tour belonged to the second phase, the decisively anticapitalist political stand. Here, the comparison with Hashmi was more justified, though the latter was heavily involved in the Communist Party, whereas PKM avoids affiliation with political parties.

This play had gotten PKM into trouble in the past. As they were setting up for the final show of the day — in the middle of a market in the bustling Buddhist pilgrim-age town of Bodh Gaya — one of the actors told me he had been jailed the last time they performed it. The others had been attacked by the police and beaten with rods, but not arrested. Why the police violence? The play dealt with globalization, and PKM had performed it as part of a people’s protest against a Pepsi Cola plant that had drained wells and dumped pollutants. Strikingly free of narrative, the play consists primarily of a long, heated debate between a group of farmers, a politician, and a spectral Uncle Sam figure who swoops on stage wearing an enormous black top hat and cape, both covered with photos of George Bush and advertisements for cars and soft drinks. The farmers’ anger is directed as much at the Indian politician as it is at Uncle Sam, “the foreigner.” In Bodh Gaya, a town heavily affected by international tourism, the audience reacted with wild cheers to the moment when one of the poor farmers lashes out at the politician, a character emblematic of the ruling Congress Party and its predecessor the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), who both have managed the liberalization of the Indian economy. In response to the politician’s condescending smile, the farmer shouts furi-ously, “Your job is just licking the heels of this foreigner — go, go on, lick his heels!”

Kanpur

If Prerna Kala Manch performs theater for the underclass, the next group I visited, Apna Theatre, performs theater of the underclass. Apna Theatre — which means Our Own Theater — is a theater troupe of Dalits, the “untouchables” of India’s caste system. As opposed to “untouchable” or other pejorative labels, “Dalit” is a term of assertive self-designation meaning “crushed” or “ground down” that signals a critical perspective and recognition of injustice. The injustice is considerable. I had spent the three previous years working with human rights organizations that attempt to document the largely

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unreported discrimination and violence Dalits in India face daily on account of their birth. Discrimination: segregation, denial of water rights, bigoted treatment in every-thing from education to employment to seating on the bus. Violence: murder, rape, assault, threats, kidnapping, torture, arson. In rural areas, where 75 percent of India’s population lives, most Dalits are landless agricultural laborers locked in relationships of conflict and economic dependence with dominant-caste landlords. Although the scope for social mobility is somewhat greater in the cities, many Dalits can find work doing only the “unclean” jobs that tradition has assigned to their caste — sweeping roads, repairing shoes, cleaning toilets, washing laundry, collecting garbage. Everywhere, as Dalits increasingly assert their right to equality and dominant castes fight to maintain privilege, the caste cauldron is boiling over. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, echoing the mantra of rights activists over the last decade, recently called the Dalit sit-uation a “hidden apartheid.” In terms of the sheer number of people affected, though, it’s even bigger than apartheid was — Dalits constitute over 16 percent of India’s popu-lation; in South Asia as a whole, they are an estimated 260 million, not far short of the population of the United States.

I knew Apna Theatre from my days with the human rights groups, and I knew they had a big performance coming up on April 14 in Kanpur, the largest city in India’s most populous state, where they are based. From Gaya, I traveled 600 kilometers or so on a westbound train, smashed between the buoyant, buxom wife of a bespectacled minor bureaucrat and a tired businessman whose cell phone blared themes from Tchai-kovsky’s Nutcracker Suite into the night. At dawn on the fourteenth we arrived at the Kanpur Railway Station, a grand edifice of old colonial brick recently spruced up with a few coats of fire-engine red. From the station I shared a cycle rickshaw to a familiar intersection (a riot of fruit vendors by day, but a cold battlefield of rinds, peels, packing hay, and sleeping dogs at this early hour) and walked from there to the neighborhood where several of the Apna Theatre actors live.

Outside of the proportionally small middle class, most urban Dalits live in bas-tis — slums, or housing colonies — kept segregated from other castes and communities. The basti where my friends live stands on a thin strip of land between a road and a ten-foot wide, rubbish-lined, slow-moving sewage canal that floods each year during the monsoon. Street dogs eyed me warily, and a hairy pig grunted as I entered the basti, turned two corners, and arrived at the narrow two-story tenement where Ravi Singhadia, one of the senior actors of Apna Theatre, lives. Ravi — a man of serious demeanor, sharp-eyed, intense, with a laborer’s lean, muscular body — was already up, dressed, and about to leave for work, but he changed plans upon my arrival, embrac-ing me and insisting that I have breakfast. A few hundred people live in the tenement; Ravi lives in an airless, mosquito-choked single room on the second story with his wife, their young daughter, and another three-member family. They had already eaten, but Ravi’s wife, quiet and proud like her husband, lit their single gas burner and heated me an edifying paratha followed by a cup of black tea (they cannot afford the milk required for sweet chai) while Ravi and I caught up. Other actors in the troupe showed up after

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hearing of my arrival, and before long Dev Kumar, the director, appeared in Ravi’s doorway in a towel, fresh from a bath at the basti ’s public pump.

“Jai Bhim!” he thundered, smiling broadly.“Jai Bhim!” I returned. The greeting, standard protocol among Dalit activists and

sympathizers, means “victory to Bhim,” Bhim being affectionate shorthand for Bhim-rao Ramji Ambedkar (1891 – 1956), civil rights leader, statesman, author of the Indian Constitution, architect of affirmative action in India, contemporary of Gandhi, and icon of the Dalit movement — if there were an American equivalent, it might be Mar-tin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall wrapped into one. The greeting was all the more apt given the day, April 14, which was Ambedkar’s birthday and the occasion for the Apna Theatre performance I had come to see.

Ravi left for work — he earns a livelihood hawking vegetables from a cart — so after praising his wife for her cooking, I decamped with the others to Dev Kumar’s house, a short walk away. Dev, a burly and bushy-haired man in his thirties, vacillates between smoldering defiance and brotherly warmth. His outrage at the condition of his people — “Have you seen hell?” he once asked me, “I’ll show it to you” — is the engine that drives Apna Theatre. In college, Dev became heavily influenced by the writings of Ambedkar: angry, erudite analyses of Indian sociology and politics in which neither British colonizer nor dominant-caste Hindu escapes fierce criticism for his role in the inhuman oppression of Dalits. Ambedkar sought Dalit emancipation through com-munity mobilization and the political safeguards of constitutional democracy. “My final words of advice to you are to educate, agitate, and organize — have faith in yourself,” Ambedkar wrote to his people in an oft-quoted passage. “For ours is a battle not for wealth or power. It is a battle for freedom. It is a battle for the reclamation of human personality.”

“Perhaps,” Dev Kumar told me once, choosing his words carefully, “Dr. Ambed-kar actually did more for me than my own father.” At the same time that he was read-ing Ambedkar’s works, Dev noticed some liberal “upper caste” students in his college performing street plays in poor neighborhoods. Hoping to combine the street theater model with Ambedkar’s agenda for dignity and empowerment, he sketched out a script for a play depicting Dalit subjugation and assertion. Dev, Ravi, and some other youth in the community, with no theater experience between them, staged it on a street cor-ner in their basti. The effect was electric. The old guard — weathered Dalit patriarchs, survivors of the status quo — objected. It was too radical, they said, and would only invite trouble from the dominant castes. Some neighborhood thugs, muscle in the pay of the ruling political party, also let their disapproval be known. Fearfully, Dev’s father forbade him to continue with drama.

But the younger generation loved it, and Apna Theatre was born. Over the next fifteen years, despite harassment, the handful of Dalit boys from Dev’s neighborhood grew to an organized troupe of Dalit talent from all over Kanpur. They performed street plays in their bastis and stage plays at rallies and public halls; they even began to tour outside Kanpur and participate in drama competitions. But they remained a vol-

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unteer group, driven by passion and ideology but strapped for cash and constrained by their various day jobs. They were painters, sweepers, vendors, small-time electricians, daily wage earners. Moreover, they were Dalits — if their performances thrilled and challenged audiences in their own community, dominant-caste critics either ignored them or called them unpatriotic, antinational.

Once he had gotten dressed, we proceeded from Dev’s house to McRobertsGanj, the sprawling campus of a moldering, long-defunct British factory, the workers’ quar-ters of which had evolved into a Dalit colony. There preparations were under way for the evening’s parade and rally in celebration of Ambedkar’s birthday. Throughout the day, while we strung up banners, buses and tractors packed with Dalits from the sur-rounding districts poured into McRobertsGanj. When the parade started in the late afternoon, tens of thousands of Dalit women and men flooded the streets of Kanpur. I rode on a tractor full of angry Dalit women shouting slogans into an ancient, semifunc-tional megaphone. When we passed through impoverished bastis, throngs of families cheered us, thrusting water packets and sherbet at us for refreshment. In dominant-caste locales, the streets were lined with silent, unsmiling faces and crossed arms, and the police presence was considerable.

Night fell as the parade reached its destination, a vast public park in the center of Kanpur, a sea of grass over which statues of Gandhi, Ambedkar, and other founders of the nation float like marble islands. As the thousands flowed into the park, I found Dev Kumar, Ravi, and the others fretting over technicalities near the elevated bamboo and cloth stage upon which they would soon be performing. The team was short two actors, the percussionist was late, costumes had yet to arrive, and the stage was poorly miked. In short, the usual. Impressed by the size of the crowd, I asked whether Apna Theatre might actually get paid for this performance. Dev Kumar shook his head. Ravi shot me a rare smile and said, “Kabhi mutthi bhar channa, kabhi voh bhi nahin.” Sometimes a handful of chickpeas, sometimes not even that. “Anyway,” he went on, “we do this for ourselves, our people, not for money.”

I took a seat near the front of the audience. Minutes later, missing percussionist and other problems miraculously resolved, Apna Theatre was introduced, and the play began. It was Apna Theatre’s signature piece, the epic of oppression and emancipation that Dev Kumar had originally penned fifteen years ago. It tells the story of two pivotal moments in Indian history — one ancient, one modern — but with a radical reversal of hero and villain.

A singing narrator, the staple of Indian folk drama, establishes the context: ancient India, before the Aryan invasion, when the indigenous people lived peacefully with each other and the land. Three lean, dark, hard-bodied men wearing colorful cos-tumes of hemp, leather, and bird feathers stride on stage; Ravi is their leader. Dancing a strongly rhythmic, athletic dance, they sing: “We are the people of this land. . . . Hu, Ha, Hu, Ha! This is our soil. . . . Hu, Ha, Hu, Ha!”

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Next enter three Aryans — soft, plump, fair-skinned, wearing prayer beads and saffron robes — who immediately attack the indigenous men. Staggered evenly across the stage, the three pairs of antagonists struggle in a stylized wrestling match, creating a tableau of primal conflict underscored by a driving tabla rhythm. Finally the indig-enous people throw the Aryans to the ground, physically defeating them and exiting triumphantly to inform their king, Bali.

The Aryans, however, are not so easily overcome. They consult their god Vishnu, who teaches them to defeat the natives by trickery, taking advantage of their virtue of hospitality. Disguised as supplicants, then, the Aryans approach the court of the indig-enous king, Bali — played by Dev Kumar himself — who grants them a boon, anything they wish. “Give us your kingdom, land, and crown!” they cry, flinging off their dis-guises, “And your people as subjects! And hereafter you will serve us!”

Honor-bound, Bali concedes. Laughing, the Aryans subject the natives to slavery and label them “untouchable”; they institute the caste system to keep the slaves in their place, and compose Hindu scriptures to sanctify the whole structure. Fast-forwarding through several millennia to the present day, act 1 concludes with a center-stage monologue by Ravi, broken, dressed in tatters, reduced from the proud indigenous man of ancient times to the degraded Dalit laborer of today.

I could not help but scan the crowds for signs of trouble. The portrayal of Hin-duism in the play is scathing — its fore-bears are depicted as scheming, gloating, conscienceless oppressors — and broad-casting this from a public stage before thousands in a predominantly Hindu city seemed to me awfully ballsy. But the multitudes populating the park appeared to be pretty much entirely Dalits — it was Ambedkar’s birthday, after all. The audience was enthralled, not enraged.

While the first act depicts Dalit subjugation, the second act represents Dalit resur-gence — through the life story of Ambedkar. First, several scenes of his childhood and youth: altercation at the village well, discrimination in the classroom, struggles at col-lege. In a clever bit of double casting, the same actors who play the Aryans in the first act play Ambedkar’s “upper caste” tormentors in the second, and the adult Ambedkar, when he finally appears, is none other than King Bali reprised — Dev Kumar again. The climactic scene dramatizes the long-standing conflict between the mature Ambedkar and Gandhi over the “Untouchable Problem.” While Gandhi insists that untouchables

Prerna Kala Manch, Bodh Gaya, 2006. Photo: Joel Lee

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are an inseparable part of Hinduism, Ambedkar refutes him — how can untouchables be a part of the very community that excludes them from temples and treats them like lepers? When Gandhi says, “The work of untouchable toilet cleaners is sacred work,” Ambedkar all but roars in reply, “Then you do it! My people have had enough!”

The play ends with an impassioned speech by Ambedkar, exhorting Dalits to stand proud, obtain education, demand equality, and seize political power. In the final tableau, Ravi’s character, again transformed, stands next to Ambedkar, strong, deter-mined, and fearless.

Sammalkha

The third group, Pahal Natya Manch (Action Theater Front — Pahal, for short), is a different creature altogether. Rather than a performance troupe per se, Pahal is two individuals, Sushil Balmiki and his sidekick nephew Deepak, who run three-day street theater workshops for Dalit youth with no experience in drama. On the third day, the youth perform a street play of their own design in front of their own community. While the emphasis in Prerna Kala Manch and Apna Theatre is on transforming the community of spectators, the priority in Pahal is transforming the actor-participants themselves. Sushil and Deepak, themselves Dalit, like to attest to the empowering role theater has played in their lives. When I first heard about it, their experiment sounded to me like Augusto Boal’s. Wondering how a Theater of the Oppressed project would work in Dalit India, I asked to join Pahal for a workshop when I returned from Kan-pur, and Sushil gamely agreed.

The workshop was to be held in Sammalkha, a small town about ninety kilom-eters north of Delhi, just off a major highway. Our plan was to take a bus, but on the morning of our departure, Sushil, a man of surprises, informed me we would be driv-ing. At his instructions, I came to a metro station in the far northwest outskirts of Delhi, where he and Deepak were waiting for me in a decades-old car with completely bald tires they’d borrowed from a relative. I had met Sushil once or twice before; medi-um-built and baby-faced for forty, he sported a respectable everyman’s moustache and dressed unassumingly middle-class. But this morning, inexplicably, he stepped out of the car looking like he’d walked off a 1980s Bollywood film set — smoking a cigarette, he wore black jeans, a maroon faux-leather jacket zipped tightly over a form-fitting maroon sweater, and big black sunglasses. His nephew Deepak, a twenty-year-old heartthrob also dressed a bit like a rock star, waved from the back seat where he was buried under duffel bags and a harmonium. I got in the car and the passenger seat sank nearly to the floor. Sushil laughed. “Comfortable? Welcome to our Dalit chariot. Now chalo, let’s go, we’re already late.”

Speeding north on a smooth highway past obscure Mughal tombs and flashy new petrol stations, we talked of how Pahal began. Sushil had attended the National School of Drama, India’s premiere, state-sponsored college for the performing arts in Delhi, having been recommended for a scholarship by a high school teacher who recognized

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his talent. One of the National School’s only Dalit graduates, Sushil moved to Bombay to work in its thriving entertainment industry, writing scripts for Hindi sitcoms and assistant-directing Bollywood films. But as a Dalit in the industry he felt isolated, and found himself increasingly alienated by the crass commercialism of his work. After a few years he returned to Delhi, wanting to give something back to the community using the only trade he knew. Finding a willing partner in his musically talented nephew, Sushil launched Pahal Natya Manch and began organizing workshops for Dalit youth in conjunction with Dalit NGOs.

It was midafternoon when we pulled off the highway at Sammalkha and rolled gently into its cacophonous crush of cows, hawkers, fruit-laden carts, and pedestrians. It was only a three-day workshop and we were several hours late; I wondered how it would come together given that we’d already lost the better part of the first day.

Day OneThe venue for the workshop was a run-down wedding hall, the best the organizers could afford to rent, in a narrow alley. About forty Dalit youth in their late teens and early twenties, from villages and small towns all over the state of Haryana, awaited us in the main room. More than half were women. They applauded our entrance and Sushil, suddenly surging with charismatic energy, launched into workshop mode.

First he had the group form a circle, introduce themselves one by one, and explain why they think theater might be valuable. Four or five of the youth spoke confidently and clearly: “I’m Vimal from Kurukshetra, I’m doing my studies, and I want to be a computer engineer. Theater is important because you forget what you read in a book but you remember what you see in a play or a film.”

As a whole, though, the introductions were timid, faltering, even apologetic. Projection and posture were severe problems. Several girls managed only to whisper their names, and even with Sushil’s warm, encouraging prodding, could not produce a sentence on theater. One young woman, Shakuntala, spent the entire session rocking back and forth, staring at the floor silently; when her turn came, she simply wept — and that, too, without a sound. This was more than adolescent awkwardness; many of these youth were truly socially handicapped. Poverty and caste had trained their bodies to fold inward; gender oppression had taught them silence.

Games followed. Sushil orchestrated a series of exercises to the get the youth laughing, moving, and aware of their bodies. In one, the group throws a rubber ball at individuals on the opposite side of the room, who are supposed to throw it back. “Being Dalits,” Sushil explained to the group, “we are always facing people who hurl things at us — abuse, slaps, nasty treatment. How do we react? You can flinch and cower, or you can throw it right back at them.”

By evening, the ice had broken somewhat; it was no acting company, but at least most of the kids were talking. After a greasy group dinner of fried puris and potato masala, Sushil had everyone sit in a circle and share — by candlelight, since the elec-tricity had been out since morning — their personal experiences of caste discrimina-

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tion. This time, Shakuntala managed a few words. “My mother . . . ” she began, in a scarcely audible murmur, “cleans toilets.” Then she burst into tears again, and could not continue.

Day TwoWe started the morning with warm-up games followed by a brainstorming session on the subject of the play to be performed tomorrow. Sushil asked the youth to suggest themes from their own life experiences that might make for a good drama. The confi-dent among them made proposals — the pleasures and perils of intercaste romance, the evils of alcoholism, the futility of pig sacrifice and other superstitious practices. The winning idea came from a young woman named Babli, who posed the simple question: where are the Dalit children who aren’t attending school?

With Sushil’s guidance, the youth agreed on a structure for the drama and split into groups to develop the scenes. It was to be a series of vignettes on the lives of Dalit children, held together by a frame story in which a foreigner — despite my attempts to keep out of the way, my presence apparently influenced the creative process — comes to a remote Indian village and asks the local school teacher why there are no Dalit chil-dren in class. The teacher, an “upper caste” chauvinist, takes the foreigner on a tour of the village, delivering contemptuous commentary on the various scenes they encounter and blaming the Dalits for their laziness, poor hygiene, inherent lack of merit, and so on. Gradually the foreigner realizes that it is the teacher’s bigotry that is the problem; he confronts the teacher, threatening to expose him in a newspaper article, and the teacher begs for mercy and promises to change.

Rehearsals began immediately after lunch. By late afternoon a full run-through was attempted. Predictably, it was a flop — movement chaotic, dialogue inaudible, story line completely incomprehensible. Sushil made the group try yet another exercise in body awareness and vocalizing. At one point, Shakuntala was at the center of the circle, holding herself upright and forward while a young woman squatting behind her pulled her arms down and backward. In this posture of resistance, Shakuntala was asked to introduce herself. Twice, three times, she whispered it. Then, without warning, a clear, powerful voice rang out: “I am Shakuntala! I come from Fatehbad!” The whole circle rippled with surprise. Shakuntala herself looked startled. There were cheers, and the group resumed rehearsals with renewed energy.

Day ThreeMorning run-throughs were messy and Sushil was irritable. At noon, just four hours or so before the team was to perform in front of hundreds of their family members, neighbors, and community in the nearby basti, two of the young women were called home for an unspecified family emergency. This turn of events necessitated some last-minute role switching. Morale sank and the ensuing rehearsal was disastrous. Halfway through, Sushil suddenly screamed for everyone to be silent and then spoke calmly: “Our coming here has been a waste of time. Clearly you all don’t care two bits about

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this play and you’re not interested in improving or becoming anything. Go on, then, enjoy yourselves, piddle around for the rest of the day. Deepak, Joel, and I are going back to Delhi. Deepak, pack your harmonium. Joel, come, we’re leaving.” And he marched out of the room.

It was the most hackneyed high-school drama tantrum I had ever witnessed, and it had precisely the desired effect. Five minutes later, the youth sent emissaries to plead with us to stay. Sushil relented only slightly, agreeing to remain until lunch. Meanwhile the group started a fresh run-through on its own initiative, this time with self-imposed discipline and focused energy. By lunch, the pretence of our imminent departure had collapsed and Sushil was giving notes. “Anita, face the audience! Madhu, projection! Rajesh, slow down on the pig slaughter, make sure the audience follows your action! Balwant, nice work in the band scene, but don’t scratch your balls when you’re nervous!”

At four in the afternoon, our band of forty spilled onto the streets of Sam-malkha. Attracting puzzled stares the whole way, we walked the main thoroughfare from the wedding hall past a dusty park to a side road leading to the Dalit basti on the edge of town. Where the pavement ends and the mud road begins — the cartographic equivalent of the untouchability barrier — we took out drums and started singing, advertising the street play. A crowd formed quickly, women and children emerging from their mud and brick homes, laborers returning from work on bicycles and on foot. We picked the widest intersection in the basti and planted ourselves there, still singing and drumming, while an audience of several hundred amassed on all sides. A patch of road sufficed for the stage. There were no props, and no costumes. The performers had never acted before in their lives. The play began.

Vimal, playing the foreigner, walks into a school classroom and finds Balwant, the “upper caste” teacher, asleep at his chair, two students massaging his feet. Vimal taps Balwant on the shoulder; Balwant wakes halfway, curses the children at his feet, slaps their heads, and goes back to sleep. Already the crowd is chuckling. Balwant mis-takes the next tap for a fly and abuses it roundly; at the third he sees Vimal and falls out of his seat — peals of laughter! Insecure, self-effacing Balwant, a mumbler on day one, proves to be a slapstick natural.

The opening scene turns into such a crowd-pleaser that the actors gain con-fidence and begin improvising. In the headiness of the moment they forget how to segue into the second scene, but Sushil, inventing a character on the spot, leaps into the fray, guides them through the transition and saves the day. The band scene is a success.

Audience members in Bodh Gaya, 2006. Photo: Joel Lee

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Apna Theatre, 2006. Photo: Joel Lee

Dialogue in the pig-slaughter scene is completely drowned out by howls of laughter. But it’s not all comedy — when the polio-afflicted student tells his story, the audience clucks, shakes their heads, murmurs, “True, true.”

Midway through, there is a commotion of shouting and revving engines to one side, but the show goes on. Later we learn that some dominant-caste ruffians, hearing of the play, arrived on their motorcycles to disrupt it, but were repelled by the tough young Dalits of the neighborhood, who felt protective of the performers.

Back to the play: Shakuntala, Madhu, and the rest manage to project their voices. Twilight has fallen in the basti, but the drama continues in the semidarkness. From scene to scene, the novice performers gain momentum and verve. Energy cycles between actors and audience in an escalating spiral. In the final scene, Balwant’s des-perate, falling-on-the-floor groveling before Vimal — the ultimate humiliation of the “upper caste” villain — launches the crowd into appreciative hysterics, despite the now near-total lack of visibility. The play concludes in the dark with the entire company singing a mother’s song: “Do your studies, child, do your studies, listen to your moth-

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er’s wisdom and make something of yourself.” Repeating the refrain six, ten, dozens of times, with dancing and drumming, the company sings and sings and sings. The audi-ence joins in, and everyone grows hoarse singing as night deepens over Sammalkha.

In Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal writes of a Peruvian woman who, asked to create a picture of her hometown with stationary actors, placed them in a tableau depicting the castration of a peasant rebel by landlords. I had just witnessed forty Dalit youth effectively answering the same challenge — to create a picture of their home commu-nities — with a street play featuring social exclusion, child abuse, parental alcohol-ism, and rampant caste discrimination at school. If Boal’s painstakingly intentional method is based on somewhat dogmatic aesthetics, Sushil’s more ad hoc approach reflects a pragmatic synthesis of drama-school savvy and the shared social experience of Dalit life. But the goals were similar: as in the Boalian experiments, the exercise at Sammalkha was intended not to purge spectators of their revolutionary sentiments, but rather to stimulate in the actors critical awareness of their situation and their capacity to alter the story.

Was it successful? Is it too early to tell?After the play, as we all returned to the workshop venue, I noticed that Vimal and

Balwant were walking taller than they had two days before, their smiles broad, their stride newly confident. Shakuntala, too, seemed a different person. Walking beside me, she told me that things were going to change when she got back home to Fatehbad. “Brother,” she said, “today I brought out my voice for the first time. From today, no one will be able to stop it.”