F E A T U R E S

Balraj Sahni at Jawaharlal Nehru University

AN enlightened convocation address delivered by the famous actor Balraj Sahni in Jawaharlal Nehru University way back in 1972 is still remembered as it reflects the true spirit of democratic culture and rational inquiry. A progressive thinker and an enlightened and talented actor, Balraj dwells on essential human spirit of freedom, creativity and how exploitation should be faced. He says, “ In the course of my life, whenever I have been able to make my own crucial decisions, I have been happy. I have felt the breath 'of freedom on my face. I have called myself a free man. My spirit has soared high and I have enjoyed life because I have felt there is meaning to life.”

About twenty years ago, the Calcutta Film Journalists' Association decided to honour the late Bimal Roy, the maker of DO Bigha Zameen and us, his colleagues. It was a simple but tasteful ceremony. Many good speeches were made, but the listeners were waiting anxiously to hear Bimal Roy. We were all sitting on the floor, and I was next to Bimal Da. I could see that as his turn approached he became increasingly nervous and restless. And when his turn came he got up, folded his hands and said, “Whatever I have to my I say if in my films. I have nothing more to say,” and sat down.

There is a lot in what Bimal Da did, and at this moment my greatest temptation is to follow his example. The fact that I am not doing so is due solely to the profound regard I have for the name which this august institution bears; and the regard I have for yet another person, Shri P.C. Joshi, who is associated with your university. I owe to him some of the greatest moments of my life, a debt that I can never repay. That is why when I received an invitation to speak on this occasion; I found it impossible to refuse. If you had invited me to sweep your doorstep I would have felt equally happy and honoured. Perhaps that service would have been more equal to my merit.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to be modest. Whatever I said was from my heart and whatever I shall say further on will also be from my heart, whether you find it agreeable and in accordance with the tradition and spirit of such occasions or otherwise. As you may know, I have been out of touch with the academic world for more than a quarter of a century. I have never addressed University Convocation before.

It would not be out of place to mention that the severance of my contact with your world has not been voluntary. It has been due to the special conditions of film making in our country. Our little film world either offers the actor too little work, forcing him to eat his heart out in idleness; or gives him too much --so much that he gets cut off from all other currents of life. Not only does he sacrifice the pleasures of normal family life, but he also has to ignore his intellectual and spiritual needs. In the last twenty-five years have worked in more than one hundred and twenty five films. In the same period a contemporary European or American actor would have done thirty or thirty-five. From this you can imagine what a large part of my life lies buried in strips of celluloid. A vast number of books, which I should have read, I have not been able to read. So many events I should have taken part in have passed me by. Sometimes I feel terribly left behind. And the frustration increases when I ask myself how many of these one hundred and twenty-five films had anything significant in them? How many have any claim to be remembered? Perhaps a few. They could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And even they have either been forgotten already or will be, quite soon.

That is why I said I was not being modest. I was only giving a warning, so that in the event of my disappointing you, you should be able to forgive me. Bimal Roy was right. The artist's domain is his work. So, since I must speak, I must confine myself to my own experience to what I have observed and felt, and wish to communicate. To go outside that would be pompous and foolish. I'd like to tell you about an incident which took place in my college days and which I have never been able to forget. It has left a permanent impression on my mind.

I was going by bus from Rawalpindi to Kashmir with my family to enjoy the summer vacation. Halfway through we were halted because a big chunk of the road had been swept away by a landslide caused by rain the previous night. We joined the long queues of buses and cars on either side of the landside. Impatiently we waited for the road to clear. It was a difficulty job for the P.W.D. and it took some days before they could cut a passage through. During all this time the passengers and the drivers of vehicles made a difficult situation even more difficult by their impatience and constant demonstration. Even the villagers nearby got fed up with the high-handed behaviour of the city-walas.

One morning the overseer declared the road open. The green- flag was waved to the drivers. But we saw a strange sight. No driver was willing to be the first to cross. They just stood and stared at each other from either side. No doubt the road was a makeshift one and even dangerous. A mountain on one side, and a deep gorge and the river below. Both were forbidding. The overseer had made a careful inspection and had opened the road with a full sense of responsibility. But nobody was prepared to trust his judgment, although these very people had, till yesterday, I accused him and his department of laziness and incompetence. Half an hour passed by in dumb silence. Nobody moved. Suddenly we saw a small green sports car approaching. An Englishman was driving it; sitting all by himself. He was a bit surprised to see so many parked vehicles and the crowd there. I was rather conspicuous, wearing my smart jacket and trousers. "What's happened?" he asked me. I told him the whole story. He laughed loudly, blew the horn and went straight ahead, crossing the dangerous portion without the least hesitation.

And now the pendulum swung the other way. Every body was so eager to cross that they got into each other's way and created a new-confusion for some time. The noise of hundreds of engines and hundreds of horns was unbearable.

That day I saw with my own eyes the difference in attitudes between a man brought up in a free country and a man brought up in an enslaved one. A free man has the power to think, decide, and act for himself. But the slave loses that power. He always borrows his thinking from others, wavers in his decisions, and more often than not only takes the trodden path.

I learnt a lesson from this incident, which has been valuable to me. I made it a test for my own life. In the course of my life, whenever I have been able to make my own crucial decisions, I have been happy. I have felt the breath 'of freedom on my face. I have called myself a free man. My spirit has soared high and I have enjoyed life because I have felt there is meaning to life.

But, to be frank, such occasions have been too few. More often, than not I had lost courage at the crucial moment, and taken shelter under the wisdom of other people. I had taken the safer path. I made decisions, which were expected of me by my family, by the bourgeois class to which I belonged, and the set of values upheld by them. I thought one way but acted in another. For this reason, afterwards I have felt rotten. Some decisions have proved ruinous in terms of human happiness. Whenever I lost courage, my life became a meaningless burden. I told you about an Englishman. 1 think that in itself is symptomatic of the sense of inferiority that I felt at that time. I could have given you the example of Sardar Bhagat Singh who went to the gallows the same year. I could have given you the example of Mahatma Gandhi who always had the courage to decide for himself. I remember how my college professors and the wise respectable people of my home town shook their heads over the folly of Mahatma Gandhi, who thought he could defeat the most powerful empire on earth with his utopian principles of truth and non-violence. I think less than one per cent of the people of my city dreamt that they would see India free in their lifetime. But Mahatma Gandhi had faith in himself, in his country, and his people. Some of you may have seen a painting of Gandhiji done by Nandlal Bose. It is the picture of a man who has the courage to think and act for himself.

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Partition Memories and Reconciliation-1
Satya P. Gautam

I am one of the post-midnight, post-partition generations born during the early fifties of the last century.  My infancy and childhood were spent in our village Masaania, almost a kilometre’s walk from the railway station Shaam Chauraasi. The railway station, on the Jalandhar –Hoshiarpur railway track, was named after the famous but a relatively distant village, a pilgrimage sight for the lovers of classical music. The families, living with the tradition of classical music for generations, had to leave the village with the partition of Punjab. However, Salaamat Ali- Amaanat Ali brothers from the Shaam Chaurasi Gharaana carried with them the family tradition to the west Punjab in Pakistan.

My grand father told me that before the partition of the Punjab in 1947, inhabitants in most of the villages in our rural neighbourhood were predominantly Muslim. I was also told that till the eve of the partition, none of the three major religious groups of Punjab - the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs had ever expected its partition or fragmentation. The partition of Punjab came without being sought, without being asked for by the Punjabis. And yet it brought with it a baffling lunacy manifested in the worst forms of chaos, arson, turmoil, mystification, calamities of rape, eviction, dislocation and refuge. The bitter memories of this madness, whether lived or learnt through narration, haunted the survivors, perpetrators and their descendent generation.

 People of Punjab passed through a rather slow but gradual transition from being a predominantly oral community to become a marginally literate community during the late nineteenth and earlier decades of the twentieth century under the colonial regime. Of course, it must not be forgotten, and indeed we constantly need to remind ourselves time and again, that this historic period of transition had presented complex and unprecedented challenges for which we could not prepare our selves.  The opportunity of spread of literacy could have been a significant step for the development and enrichment of Punjabi language and culture. Unfortunately, our ancestors unwittingly collaborated to metamorphose this excellent possibility in to a disaster. During this period, the religious and social elite of each of the three denominations tried their utmost to get their own preferred (religious) scripts accepted or imposed as the exclusive official script of Punjabi language as medium of instruction in the schools. This contest and rivalry resulted in a widespread mutual unfriendliness and acrimony to the point that both the Muslim and Hindu elite unwisely disowned Punjabi and made the mistake of professing Urdu and Hindi as their respective languages. In the name of the democratic principle of respecting the majority view, the British Administration decided to implement the use of Urdu as the medium of instruction in schools and local official language for administrative purposes in the colonial Punjab. Thus the teaching and learning of Punjabi became marginal in the formal education system.

With the departure of the British and the partition of Punjab, the question of script of Punjabi language resurfaced among the Hindu and Sikh leaders again in the East Punjab. It remained a source of fallacious claims on the part of the majority of the Hindu social elite and resulted in the reorganisation of the state in to Punjab and Haryana in 1966. In the West Punjab, Urdu continued to be the medium of instruction and administration as it had been declared the official language of Pakistan despite dissenting voices raised in East Pakistan. The issue of the significance of Punjabi language and culture rejuvenated itself in the West Punjab only after the formation of Bangla Desh as an independent nation state. The other Pakistani sub-nationalities, such as Sindhis, Baluchs and Pushtoons had started demanding the recognition and use of their respective languages for educational and administrative purposes in their provinces. It may sound ironic that Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, was the language of Muhajirs  (migrants from Delhi and UP), and not of any local people in Pakistan.  Sindhis, Baluchis and Pashtoons had mustered courage to launch struggles for the protection of their respective national languages and cultures. It was in such a scenario that it dawned on the Punjabis in the West Punjab that they had allowed themselves to become an unwitting party to let their own language almost vanish by default. This belated concern for Punjabi language and culture gathered momentum and inspired the launching of the “Lok Virsaa” movements during the early seventies in the western Punjab for the rehabilitation of Punjabi language at its rightful place. This struggle was moderate but effective in slowly achieving its main goals with the beginning of the present century. It is no longer an offence to speak Punjabi in the Punjab Legislative Assembly.  Steps have been taken to teach Punjabi, in the Shahmukhi script, in schools from class three onwards in the Western Punjab. It may not be wrong to conclude that the twentieth century was a century of tragedies for Punjabi language, culture and people. Punjabis not only divided themselves on the question of the script but sections of Muslims and Hindus went to the extreme of disowning their language for privileging their preferred scripts. The blemishes of this scripted acrimony linger with us in varieties of facades and pretexts even today. Punjabis, across the borders, cutting across religious denominations, will have to make concerted efforts to save and protect Punjabi language and culture from future erosion and decline particularly in the wake of privileging of other languages in the process of globalisations and economic development.

With an unanticipated partition of the Punjab, the western Punjab formed a part of the newly constituted state of Pakistan and the eastern Punjab remained in India. With the sudden partition, a devastating dislocation of populations was forced in such a harsh manner that it further intensified the bitterness and lingering hostilities. The violence of partition generated deep feelings of terror, fear, hostility, hatred and other negative emotions among its victims and perpetrators. At the depths of despair and madness, on both the sides of the divide, the ‘Other’ was being seen and projected as the greatest and possibly the most dangerous enemy. This enemy had to be pulled down as effectively and as soon as possible On our side, we were being taught in our schools that the Muslims had partitioned our great country, fragmenting it into such antagonistic pieces which could survive only with the decimation of the other. That the partition had become a reality as a result of the agreement between the leaders of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League did not get the mention worth its name. It was the people of Punjab who had to actually live with the reality of the partition of their land, culture and language. Perhaps the same could be said about Bengal and Kashmir. Of course, a very large number of people from many other parts of the Indian subcontinent had been dislocated and brutalised as a result of the partition. The officially and socially designed image of the Pakistani Muslim was a negative typecast of a lurking brutal trespasser waiting to kill and reduce to rubble whatever came his way.

[Dr. Satya Pal Gautam is a Professor at Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi] This article is courtesy author and SEMINAR]

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Street theatre in Delhi
Ishtiaq Ahmed

THE International Women's Day on March 8 is celebrated throughout the world to highlight the continuing vulnerable situation of women and to emphasise that as long as females are treated as inferior a genuinely egalitarian, democratic and humane society is still a very distant goal.

This message was brought home with intense dramatic effect on the lawns of Kirormal College of the University of Delhi by the street theatre group, Nishant (which means in Hindi 'end of darkness'). It was a fairly mild spring day and a large group of students and teachers were waiting for the play to start. I arrived just in time to see the group play an adapted version of the well-known Urdu short-story writer and novelist Krishan Chander's (1914-1977) famous story, Garrha (Hole/Pit). It is one of the most powerful satires of Krishan Chander.

The senior-most members of Nishant, Professor Shamsul Islam and his wife Neelima Sharma, have been for years taking up the themes of poverty, corruption, casteism, religious bigotry and warmongering in their street performances. In the original story a poor man falls into a hole in the earth. He starts yelling for help but nobody pays any attention to his pleas because they see no advantage in coming to his aid. Neelima had adapted Krishan Chander's Garrha to the stark reality of female degradation and replaced the man with a woman.

The woman pleads for help but street loafers, politicians, priests, the police and an academic bloke researching precisely the depressed status of Indian women -- one after the other arrive on the scene but helping a woman in distress does not cut much ice with them. The reasons they give for not doing so make very interesting though pathetic reasoning: the most interesting scene is when a Hindu pundit and a Muslim mulla refuse her help under various pretexts, including their suspicion that she does not belong to their faith, but both agree that women who do not obey men deserve to be punished and therefore falling in the pit must be some sort of divine penalising.

I could notice that the actors were completely engrossed in the characters assigned to them and made very convincing cases of the roles they played. The director, Professor Shamsul Islam, had with great skill and imagination employed humour and wit rather than a harsh and stern approach in interpreting the plight of the woman in the hole. We know from the long tradition of playwriting extending from Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw that humour can sometimes be the most powerful medium to portray tragedy; Professor Islam indeed had grasped that point very well and brought it across most subtly.

I, therefore, do not know exactly whom the credit should go to most -- to Krishan Chander for providing the original idea of capitalist society treating poor human beings as expendable commodity; to Neelima Sharma for replacing the poor man with a poor and disowned woman and thus locating the focal point of oppression even more accurately; to Shamsul Islam for his excellent direction; or, to the various young men and women who played their roles so convincingly.

Perhaps the wisdom of the whole experience is not to try to identify the one particular candidate for most credit; rather, it was the spirit of comradeship and team work of the Nishant Street Theatre Group that deserved to get appreciation and praise collectively. Indeed the Nishant Group's philosophy is that only by working together can human beings create a better world.

The performance had an electrifying effect on the audience. Hundreds of students and several from the faculty were watching the play, and I in particular looked at the young female students who were watching it with utmost concentration. There was no doubt that each one of us had been profoundly touched by the play. Afterwards several small groups were formed and the audience and the Nishant actors were engaged in lively discussion on the position of women in Indian society. The general consensus was that without popular participation in awareness-raising campaigns things will not change fundamentally.

Nishant comprises about 100 committed activists who have performed street theatre in Hindi, Urdu, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Punjabi and Telugu. It started its cultural journey in 1971 with the object of taking the dreams of justice and equality of people like Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, Ashfaqullah Khan, Chandershekhar Azad, Udham Singh and others who laid down their lives while opposing British rule in India to the common people of India who they believe have been cheated by the ruling classes of India.

Nishant has to its credit more than 50 plays and hundreds of songs. The Nishant activists are known for their quick cultural intervention at any place where needed. They have even been to Pakistan and performed in Lahore. It was heartening to know that the reception of the Lahore crowd to their play had also been immensely positive and many women came forward to discuss with them how to create similar groups in Pakistan.

It reminded me of the late 1960s and early 1970s when we in Pakistan had been mobilising mass support for the Pakistan People's Party and its charismatic leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who promised food, clothing and shelter to all citizens. I remember how idealistic young men and also girls and women had joined that mass mobilisation, but everything went wrong after 1977. Now in Pakistan one found either enthusiasts of neo-liberal capitalism or neo-fascist fundamentalism.

The heroic left meets to recall old times and tell tales of revolutionaries of a bygone era who struggled for a better world. I must say my own nostalgia for those days and a sense of guilt for leading a rather privileged life in the west has always bothered me. I was therefore deeply moved by the efforts of the street actors of Delhi to continue to uphold the honourable tradition of campaigning for a better world through theatre.

Like Nishant I too am convinced that the purpose of life is to try to change the world in a way that nobody is treated unjustly or unfairly and nobody has to live in fear of persecution and hunger. One day hopefully this message of Nishant will be heeded by all and sundry. My own hunch is that social-democracy coupled with individual freedom and choice and the rule of law is the formula that will ultimately prevail because that combination is the best one that we know of thus far.

[The writer is professor of political science at the University of Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: Ishtiaq.Ahmed@statsvet.su.se.

Courtesy http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=49113]

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