Director Kuljeet Singh’s play Kujh Afsaney presented a collage of four stories by Saadat Hasan Manto. It raised questions on issues pertaining to creative freedom. Rupinder Kaur reports
Pulping Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History and removing AK Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas for providing alternative theories to the Hindu mythologies triggered a debate in the academic circuit and artist fraternity. A few decades ago, short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto faced a similar situation for the work he believed in.
Atelier Theatre Group presented Kujh Afsaney, a collage of four stories by Manto, as a part of Punjabi Theatre Festival. Director, actor Kuljeet Singh says, “We adapted four tales of Manto, Bu, Thanda Ghosht, Dhuan and Kaali Salwar, for which he was charged for obscenity under Section 292 and tried. Kujh Afsaney is a creative response to the brutal, parochial and insensitive attitude of a section of people who are working overtime to codify culture. With a wide ranging characters from different classes and castes, the production playfully argues with the politics of censorship of creative arts.”
Kuljeet further shares, “Theatre for me needs to have a socio-political context. While I was finalising the structure of Kujh Afsaney I was also reading and discussing Ramanujan’s essay as well as Doniger’s book and the concept evolved out of that.”
While Bu is a non-verbal play, where the protagonist Randhir is reminiscing about his encounter with a Ghatan girl, Kaali Salwar’s Sultana, a sex worker from a small town, moves to a metropolis for a better life. Dhuan deals with a boy coming to terms with homosexuality and in Thanda Ghosht a rioter recounts how he abducted a ‘beautiful’ girl only to realise that she had been dead for sometime. Kuljeet who adds different theatrical element to each of these stories explains, “Narrating a story is different from enacting it. So I used a lot of different ways to complement the performance narrative. For instance, the beats of drum, live singing, silence interspersed with recorded sounds and dark spaces.”
In between stories, voice-overs based on Manto’s writings argue the idea of obscenity of literature.
“As Manto claimed that literature cannot be obscene, he lived with the characters he created in his stories from different strata of society. Furthermore, if one can talk of fragrance, what’s wrong with the stink which forms the part of the same society,” Kuljeet adds.
About the future of theatre in Punjabi language, Kuljeet exclaims, “Punjabi theatre is oscillating with tradition and modernity. It needs to discover a new idiom for itself.”