It was a September afternoon at Oxford University in 1980 when a motley group of young Indian students tried to corner Salman Khurshid on the issue of Rajiv Gandhi’s entry into Indian politics. The reason was that Khurshid, who then taught law and jurisprudence in Trinity College, hailed from a family of Congressmen. Although the discussion did not conclude in any definite solution or plan, it did prompt Khurshid to prepare a two-page note after it was over. After 35 years, author Ather Farouqui has written a play titled Marx My Words based on the note, just to give the present day audience a glimpse of what happened years ago.
“The play is basically about the double standards of politics, mainly of the left wing, from whom we had a lot of expectations. It is saddening to say that the party is linked to all kind of corruption and I wanted to highlight that. Nepotism was also there in left wing parties. Nothing has changed and we cannot objectively blame the Congress alone. So it’s a collective fault of all politicians for what is happening today. However, it has nothing to do with the modern day government because in any case left wing parties are now completely marginalised,” explained the playwright.
The play is directed by veteran actor Tom Alter, in three parts, the first of which is set in the house of a noted Indian politician (Khurshid). The politician is visited by his former colleagues, one being Alter, from Oxford and they start reminiscing about the discussion that happened in his room at teacher’s court in Oxford. As and when they recalled the characters that were involved in the discussion, a person representing their young version appeared on the other end of the stage. The second scene moves on to the room 35 years ago, with all the students gathered to discuss the future of India. Farouqui said, “All the students were worried about the future of Indian politics. They all sat with sherry and wine and there was a verbose, jargonised discussion about the situation of politics when Rajiv Gandhi came to power, which ultimately led nowhere. At the end of the day, as the sherry was finishing the students rushed to the bar before it closed.” In the third part of the play the audience comes back to the present day in the house of the politician where the characters spare some thought on the duality in politics and where the county is headed. He added, “I did not want to explicitly give away the names of the students involved in the discussion that is why their identities are concealed. Although some of them are mainly in the Capital including two prominent BJP journalists.”
It took him three years to complete the play but even before it was finished, the playwright received rave reactions from the political fraternity. The original name of the play was Rajiv Gandhi versus Marxmen, he told us, and when he put up a part of the play on social media, CPI(M)’s Subhashni Ali lashed out against it and that generated a debate. “She completely ignored the play’s literary merits and its insights into the forgotten aspects of Congress and left wing politics such as the political relationship between Mohit Sen of the CPI and Indira Gandhi. I have written that Sen’s brotherly affection for Gandhi proved fatal for the CPI which ended up in the division of Congress till the time Sen could influence the CPI,” he shared. As there is a silver lining to every dark cloud, Farouqui also received encouragement from many people and that gave him the courage to go ahead with the play.
According to Farouqui, it is not easy to write an out and out political play so he read the works of Simon Grey, most of whose works deal with politics. This play, as far as literary allegiance is concerned, is influenced by Grey’s The Rear Column. “I needed some sound literary basis and for that Simon’s play helped a lot. His is a masterly written play about the double standards in politics. His plays are not available in India so it took me four months to get a copy of the book,” he concluded.