Aur Kitne Tukde, staged at the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s ongoing “Natya Darshan”, is a moving play on the plight of women during Partition, as related in the book The Other Side Of Silence by Urvashi Butalia and Jamila Hashmi’s The Exile. While the former book describes the personal histories of some survivors of Partition, Jamila Hashmi’s gem of a story is a fictional account of probable reality.
During the first Parliament, it was declared that respect for woman is respect for the nation. It was decided that all Muslim women forced to leave their homes in India should be repatriated to their homes in Pakistan. In the list is Sadia who was abducted by a Hindu farmer. The autocratic mother-in-law names her Sumangala. Sadia has a little girl, but she still dreams of her brother coming to bring her back to their father’s home. But when it comes to the crux and the officer asks her name she denies her paternity and declares her Hindu name.
Harvinder Kaur played the role sensitively, giving her performance a distinctive lyrical quality. Her movements with the string cot and the dreamy style of dialogue delivery contributed to this poetic effect. For Zahida, a lively performance by Veena Chibber, this order means parting from her beloved husband Kartar Singh and their two little daughters. Kartar, emotionally played by Suman Vaidya, promises to come and fetch her from her home. It takes him eight months to get the travel papers in the meanwhile he also converts to Islam. When he makes his claims on her vowing on their love, Zahida is silent. Finally, she declares that she is a married woman and does not know Kartar.
The finest performance came from veteran actor Dolly Ahluwalia Tewari who brought to life the trauma and tragedy of rape in the train to Amritsar. Dolly’s enactment of the terrifying rape was electrifying in its immediacy. Despite the scrappy background score, Dolly carried on in solitary splendour. The meeting with her sister several years later showed Dolly’s comic timing as she describes her youthful desire for a perfect figure and the reality of her breasts been slashed off during the rape; she was in this condition when her father rejected her.
The beginning of the play, where the entire cast does callisthenics, is over-stretched. By the time Harvinder breaks off from the group to become Saida, the crowd has become restless imagining the entire evening on the same lines. The fourth story is about Harnam Kaur who tries to kill herself by jumping into the well with the other women but fails because the low water level. The son is ashamed of his mother and cannot forgive her for being the last of the women. The tension is there even after the mother risks her life to bring him to India. B. Gauri, who plays Harnam, is also the successful script writer.
Kirti Jain’s directorial design is imaginative and very neat. The beheading of the young girls by the Sikh patriarch is an image that will remain with me. The finale of the women jumping into the well is preceded by games the cast, as children, play on the slide. When the boys leave, the girls pretend to be drowning in the well and mimic the women who are about to jump in. When it is time for them to actually jump into the well, they become the women whom they were mimicking.
While the subject of Partition of the sub-continent and the creation of India and Pakistan has been the topic of creative writing in fiction, poetry, on TV and cinema, little work has been done in theatre beyond the dramatisation of stories by Manto.
Asghar Wajahat’s Jis Lahor Nahi Dekhya Voh Jamiyayi Nai is about the only celebrated play on Partition, written in 1984 and first directed in 1990 by Habib Tanvir with the Shri Ram Rep Co. The play examines the brutal division of the sub-continent through the eyes of an old Hindu widow who is found by the Muslim family that takes over her haveli in Lahore. Initially, the conflict is viewed within the codes, cannons and laws of religion, revealing both its human congruence and ugly face. That is until the humanising touch of the old woman brings about a change.