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(Figure 1): Source: Aiyappan, 1948
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Liberation Drama: The
history, philosophy and
practice of the Budhan
Theatre in India
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School: Workshop Theatre, School of English
University name: University of Leeds
Dissertation Supervisor: Dr. Jane Plastow
Word Count: 16359
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The land was ours
Even the rivers were ours
Our elders wandered the jungle and the plains
When we were hungry we would beg
If we couldn’t beg we would steal
The British came
They made laws
They made us “born criminals”
The British came and oppressed us
They beat us till our skin was flayed
The British left and the police came
Freed from the camps we were put in jails
The jungle disappeared
The land disappeared
The river disappeared
The river disappeared
The river disappeared
Chhara children song
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 5
CHAPTER 2 – COLONIALISM, STIGMATIZATION AND RESISTANCE ........................ 7
2.1
Habitual Offenders Act – 1959 ................................................................................. 14
CHAPTER 3 – THE CHHARA TRIBE – TRADITIONAL ENTERTAINER COMMUNITY
.................................................................................................................................................. 16
CHAPTER 4 – LIBERATION THEORY AND THE INDIAN SOCIAL THEATRE
MOVEMENT .......................................................................................................................... 20
4.1 Post colonialism, SAGs and the theatre of the street ..................................................... 22
CHAPTER 5 – FOUNDATION OF BUDHAN THEATRE AND ITS PLAYS FOR
LIBERATION FROM THE HISTORICAL STIGMATIZATION ......................................... 25
5.1
The play - Budhan ..................................................................................................... 32
5.2
The Death of Pinya Hari Kale ................................................................................... 39
5.3
Children Theatre – Preparing next generation .......................................................... 42
5.4
Choli Ke Picche Kya hai? (CKPKH) – An experimentation with space, script and
the actors .............................................................................................................................. 45
5.5
Kahani Meri Tumhari (KMT) – Performing Self...................................................... 49
CHAPTER 6 - IMPACT: INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL .................................................... 53
CHAPTER 7 - CONCLUSION ............................................................................................... 58
REFERENCE LIST ................................................................................................................. 61
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Chapter 1 – Introduction
This dissertation is based on a small tribe called the Chhara which was classified as a
‘Criminal Tribe’ in 1871 during colonial rule in India and then declared a De-notified Tribe
by the newly independent Government in 1952. It takes into account a cultural movement
towards freedom, adopted by them in their struggle against a dehumanizing and oppressive
status in society and the legal system. This is first-hand research that draws on my living
history as a Chhara, on-going work as an artistic director of community theatre called
Budhan Theatre and as a documentary filmmaker based in the city of Ahmedabad, India. This
work examines my community’s use of theatre as a means of disrupting the discrimination
rooted in oppressive colonial histories. It is a detailed account of the theatre practice of a so
called Criminal Tribe, to transform and empower spectators and community actors towards
change. Change means the earning of dignity, a respectful life and the self-expression of dayto-day experiences of dehumanization and an end to the cultural identity crisis of a
community which was created by the colonial regime in India by introducing legislation
called The Criminal Tribes Act (CTA).
This research explores 19th century entertainer nomadic communities in India, particularly in
the Bombay presidency, their cultural habitat, their performing arts for livelihood and the
colonial inability to understand nomadic culture. Mainly, the essay is divided into five
sections which are as follows:
(1) Colonialism, Stigmatization and Resistance, this section will focus on the historical
account of notification of nomadic tribes under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871, the
tribal community’s resistance of the British rulers in India, possible theories behind the
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construction of CTA, inhuman punishments, provisions of so-called reformatory settlements
of CTA members and suppression of traditional entertainer tribal communities.
(2) The history of de-notified tribes in India, will explore post-independence history, denotification and re-stigmatization of de-notified tribes in independent India.
(3) Indian Social Theatre and Social Action Groups (SAGs), will focus on one of the
important social and political theatre movements and the functioning of social action groups
(SAGs) in rural India.
(4) The Chharas and the theatrical experiment to liberate them from historical stigma.
This section will discuss, in detail, the Chhara tribe which is the subject of this essay, its
sufferings due to colonial branding as a criminal tribe, discrimination and atrocities against
members of the community. This section will look at a few selective plays of Budhan Theatre
on how Chhara youth are trying to overcome historical stigma through community theatre
highlighting problems like their social, political, economy and personal struggle, choices of
the play, theatre forms they adopted, the process of making community plays, their
relationship with spectators and its outputs, actors’ personal catharsis and its personal and
political importance. I will, simultaneously, examine these plays in relation to Freire’s
dialogical theory for liberation from historical stigma and Grotowsky’s poor theatre
philosophy.
(5) In the concluding part, I will analyze Budhan Theatre’s work and its output in the
context of earlier discussed chapters and will flesh out the future plan of Budhan Theatre.
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Chapter 2 – Colonialism, Stigmatization and Resistance
In the British India history, many scholars attracted to study the history of India’s de-notified
tribes who were branded as Criminal Tribes. Schwarz (2010) discusses the roots of CTA. He
explores the historical account of British regulations in the India that in 1772, under Warren
Hastings, included ‘article 35 of general regulations allowed for the punishment of offender’s
family and village on the argument that Indian criminals were such, by profession and
hereditary, and members of like-minded fraternities’ (p. 4). He goes further into an account
of the formation of criminal tribes finding that ‘Regulation XII of 1793 was directed towards
groups of criminals by profession and wandering gangs whose whole families were either put
to work on roads or otherwise were forced to settle down’ (ibid). He argues that these
regulations inspired British officials to compile list of wandering tribes who could be useful
to the state by introducing legislation to control their movements and to enable forced
sedentarization.
During the mid-nineteenth century, the British began to widen their tax net to the remote
areas of the India1. The state forcibly started to tax Adivasi (tribal) communities, who lived in
forests and mountains and were not accessible by the British, under the land revenue system,.
The revenue system also disrupted several social practices of the tribal people and brought
repressive intermediaries such as tax collectors and Jagirdars (landlords) to collect revenue
on behalf of the British regime. Colonial economic policies gave rise to many conflicts
between tribal people and the British state. The repressive system and conflicts also inspired
tribal communities to take an active part in the 1857 rebellion against the British (Chauhan,
1
Read, BANERJEE, A., and L. IYAR. 2002. History, Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of
Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India. Available from:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/seminars/banerjee.pdf.
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2009, pp. 74 - 75). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the colonial regime
faced increasingly serious resistance and revolt from various sections of Indian society,
socio-biological theories, such as Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics, influenced a range of
theorists all over the world. The theory of eugenics suggested that an inclination to commit
crime was a hereditary trait and could be controlled by re-engineering society on a biological,
rather than a political basis (Friedman, 2011). Within eugenic theory, there was a strong
school of thought put forward by criminologists and scientists, which held that crime was
inherited over generations in a family through a set of genes of a parent or an ancestor (TAG
Report, 2006, p. 54). Many great thinkers of Britain, including renowned economist John
Maynard Keynes, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Conservatives such as Arthur
Balfour, believed in eugenics (thefinalstage.info, nd). In the light of this, it may be possible
that the British administration were inspired to classify a separate section of the people in
India and to re-engineer those who resisted them, whom they called criminal classes.
Additionally, the notion that members of these tribes were born criminals was also a part of
the most frequent criminological theories, which dovetailed with the Italian school headed by
Cesare Lombroso. His idea of the born criminal, who was furthermore a biological
throwback, found ready experimentation upon the itinerant tribes, whose unsettled and
unconventional ways were little appreciated amongst the educated elites in India (Verma,
2002). In the wake of such theories being believed by scholars and intellectuals in the Britain,
the British policy makers, baffled by the indigenous wandering ways of some of the tribes
and nomad groups of India, fixed them in the category of hereditary criminals (Marriott and
Mukhopadhyay, 2006). This may be a reason for the focus in Victorian England on lower
social strata as a means of creating a category of ‘lower order species, which might
undermine social stability’ (Nijhar, 2009, p. 2), described as ‘dangerous’ (Nijhar, 2009, p. 5)
classes. It also, subsequently, accounts for the introduction of the Habitual Criminal Act in
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1869 in England and the later introduction of the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871 in Imperial
India (Nijhar, 2009, p. 2). Such laws coupled with newly imposed forest laws and revenue
policies made many of the nomads destitute, leading them into petty crime for sustenance,
which reinforced the idea of hereditary criminal traits. This was one of the ‘techniques’
(Fanon, 1990, p. 34) of colonialist to dominate colonized masses/natives and brand them as
suspect people on their own land.
The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 provided the legal mechanism to incarcerate adivasi
communities in the reformatory settlements. Sher (1965) glances into historical accounts of
settlement provisions under the CTA and stated that if any member of a registered criminal
tribe committed a crime under the Indian Penal Code specified in the first schedule, was
convicted of the same offence for a second time they would be convicted 7 to 10 years
imprisonment.
But on the third crime they were sentenced for transportation for life.
Strangely, for the same offence non-criminal tribe members were imprisoned for just 3 to 6
months or even set free. ‘Therefore, the Criminal Tribes Act was completely an act of
genocide on the criminal tribes of India’ (Sher, 1965, p. 247). The CTA also instituted
various forms of spatial control and restrictions. Criminal Tribes members had to report to the
local police station or to the village headman for roll-call, called hazri, to prove their
presence in the specified area. Sometimes, the time for reporting was from 11 pm to 3 am.
Criminal tribe members had to come for hazri (roll-call) three times a day and this rule went
on for 10 to 15 years. These awkward timings, year after year, generated frustration among
criminal tribe members as they ‘compelled some people to sleep at the police station and lead
to some deaths due to excessive cold’ (Sher, 1965, p. 246). He also notes that due to this
inhuman legal treatment, innocent people sometimes actually became criminals. This
regulation also increased sexual exploitation of so-called criminal tribe women by village
headman or local police authorities. The settlements were meant to reform criminal tribe
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members and the administration of settlements was given to a Christian Missionary
organization, the Salvation Army, which profited from the enterprise. They paid low wages to
criminal tribe members for their extremely hard work (Sher, 1965, p. 253). Vishvanathan
(2009) rightly puts that, ‘The criminalization of tribes was a great achievement of law which
was the invention of bonded labour’ (p. 65). Sher (1965) asserts that according to the
Bombay Enquiry Committee of 1939, the Christian missionaries began to convert young girls
and send them to distant places without the knowledge of their parents or guardians. It seems,
at every level, the colonial regime wanted to crush potential threats to their rule, or those who
resisted them during mid-nineteenth century.
The colonial regime’s inability to understand Indian communities led them to look upon
wandering tribes as criminals. Schwarz (2010) observes that these were people who appeared
by their nature to wander beyond the boundaries of settled civil society: sanyasis, sadhus,
fakirs, dacoits, goondas, thugs, pastoralists, herder and entertainers. Entertainers, who were
nomads in nature and traditional performers by profession, were also placed in confinement.
They became easy suspects for the police, placing them in an uneasy relation to authority
which resulted in an alarmingly high rate of an incarceration. Laddoben2, an 85-year old
Chhara woman living in Ahmedabad, recalled how nomadic communities used to be
entertainers in the state of Maharashtra, including the Kanjar tribe and they performed songs
and dance on the streets but patel (policeman) arrested them and put them into settlements.
The picture below is of the open camp-life in the Bhavnagar district of the Gujarat state
where Adodiyas (Chharas) were kept under police surveillance.
2
Interview by the author with Laddoben, Chharanagar, Ahmedabad, India on 17 th April 2011.
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(Figure 2) Source: Trivedi, 1931
These settlements were highly fenced areas to keep tribesmen inside, with round-the-clock
security. Males were not allowed to go outside but females could go only to purchase
vegetables or items of daily use from a nearby market on short term licence. They did not
know any reason why police put them in an incarceration for many years. There were hard
punishments if a person ran away from the settlement. In the documentary film Actors are
born here (2008) Dadi, a woman from the Kanjar tribe from the state of Maharashtra
described how they used to be street entertainers and sung songs such as Zhumka Gira Re,
Bareli Ke Bazzar main… (An ear ring fallen, in the market of Bareli…) and people used to
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give them grains so that they could eat something. But once they were arrested by police
without any charges and put in settlements, their lives became worse (Actors Are Born Here,
2008). The law not only restricted their movement to certain areas but made them vulnerable
to all sorts of brutality. The arrests of street entertainer communities could be a result of
section 26 of the CTA:
Any eunuch so registered who appears, dressed or ornamented like a woman, in a public
street or place, or any other place, with the intention of being seen from a public street or
place, or who dances or plays music, or takes part in any exhibition, in a public street or place
or for a hire in private house may be arrested without warrant and shall be punished with
imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine or
with both.(TAG Report, 2006, p. 227).
The above section of CTA illustrates how the colonial administration marginalised the
traditional arts and talents of nomadic communities and categorised them as criminals. Under
section 26 of CTA, children were separated from their parents to avoid hereditary crime.
These provisions increased crime among notified members as they hurt children and parents
both, emotionally and psychologically, and their reform was almost impossible (Sher, 1965,
p. 248). Between 1871 and 1924, amendments to the CTA tended to emphasise the more
oppressive provisions of the Act. The police, judiciary and village headmen got more power
to control notified tribes. The last amendment in CTA in 1924 increased the power of village
headmen. Their tainted history as nomads, forced sedentarization and social stigmatization,
gradually reduced them to a level of extreme disadvantage, while competing for employment
and education with other marginalized groups.
According to documents in the India office section at the British Library, the bill to repeal the
CTA of 1924 was introduced in the Legislative Assembly on 6th February 1947 by
Venkatasubba Reddiar. To repeal the CTA, the statement of objections and reasons issued by
Reddiar and others were as follows:
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The Criminal Tribes Act, 1924 is oppressive and inhuman. Instead of improving the moral of
the backward communities; it has the tendency to make them deteriorate mentally and
morally. The Act is a blot in the statute book and should not be allowed to stand in it
anymore. (Reddiar et al., 1947).
The bill was aimed to be effective immediately in the whole British India. But sadly, nothing
happen in this regard and the act continued for years, even after independence. It is
understood that after independence, India was so disturbed due to the bloodshed of partition
between India and Pakistan, that decisions were delayed in relation to the CTA’s abolition.
Sher (1965) explores the Government of India’s appointment of The Criminal Tribes Act
Enquiry Committee in 1949-50 to decide whether the Act should be repealed or not. The
independent government took many years to consider whether members of so-called criminal
tribes should be released. The Enquiry Committee members toured all over India for
consultation with activists, policemen, community members, etc. They recommended that
CTA was unconstitutional in free India and that all the people under this act must be freed
immediately (Sher, 1965, p. 264). However, it took a long time to free the innocent
inhabitants of the settlements. After five years and seventeen days of independence, the
Government of India repealed the CTA on 31st August 1952 with the Criminal Tribes Laws
(Repeal) Act, 1952 (Sher, 1965, p. 264). People of ex-criminal tribes were categorised as Denotified Tribes (DNT).
In Hindi they were named Vimukta Jatis (Especially-free
communities). However, there is an argument that this marginalized section of Indian society
has been neglected within Indian politics and left without constitutional safeguards or
development policies. People who fought hard against the colonial invasion for their natural
resources like forests, rivers, mountains, were once again made to disappear into the forests,
mountains and margins of villages. The Act was repealed but the stigma of ‘born criminals’
remained and DNT communities continued to be subject to repressive state policies.
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2.1
The Habitual Offenders Act – 1959
During the period of decolonization India’s new bourgeois elites began a dialogue with
capitalist countries and during this phase ‘the indigenous population [was] discerned only as
an indistinct mass’ (Fanon, 1990, p. 34). After independence, de-notified tribes became,
arguably, an ‘indistinct mass’ for elite politicians and instead of rehabilitation or welfare
policies for de-notified tribes, the independent government of India replaced the CTA with
the Habitual Offenders Act (HOA) in 1959. The ex-criminal tribes again came under state
scrutiny and suspicion, now with another name, habitual offenders. Due to their tainted
history as Criminal tribes they again became scapegoats for the police. The enactment of the
HOA empowered the police to investigate habitual offenders without warrant which resulted
in abduction, interrogation, illegal detention, custodial deaths and largely false arrests of denotified tribes. Devy (2006) studied this de-notification and how it was followed by the
substitution of a series of Acts, the most important being entitled as the Habitual Offenders
Act (HOA). De-notification should have ended the venerability of DNTs caused by the CTA
but instead, HOA preserved some provisions of the former CTA, ‘except the premise implicit
in it that an entire community could be born criminal’ (Devy, 2006, p. 22). HOA handed
power to the police to investigate habitual offenders without warrant and ex-criminal tribes
became soft targets for the police. Even, after reviewing India’s 15th – 19th periodic reports,
on 9th March 2007, The UN’s Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
directed India to repeal the HOA and to rehabilitate the de-notified tribes (Mohapatra, 2007).
After many presentations by the Gujarat based group, the De-notified and Nomadic Tribes
Right Action Group (DNT-RAG) in the National Human Rights Commission of India and
despite its issuing orders to the state governments to repeal HOA 1959 immediately, this act
prevails in most of the states in India leading to the suffering of marginalised communities,
whom Devy (2006) describes as, “invisible people… on the run for decades, halted for a
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while and looked up to us with some hope” (p. 31). Devy (2006) shares his meeting with a
member of eunuch community (included in CTA), who said to him ‘Sir, I have heard it is
said that India is now a free country with her own laws. Is it true?’ This is the question in the
mind of every Indian nomad, called a thief’ (p. 35).
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Chapter 3 – The Chhara Tribe – Traditional entertainer community
(Figure 3) The Picture of Chharanagar where the Chhara tribe lives
Source: Budhan Theatre, 2010.
The Chhara tribe, which is the case study of this thesis, was nomadic and notified as a
Criminal Tribe in the CTA. The Chharas are known as Sansis in Delhi, Punjab and Rajasthan,
Kanjar and Kanjarbhat in Maharashtra, and Adodiyas in Bhavnagar district of Gujarat.
Chharas live in a place called Chharanagar in the suburb area of Ahmedabad city in the state
of Gujarat which is in the western part of India. The population is approximately twenty
thousand, there is almost 90 per cent primary education and in every family there are
graduates but due to the stigma of being an ex-criminal tribe member, very few find jobs.
Due to unemployment in the private and government sector, many Chhara youth aspire to
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become lawyers, since law, as an independent business, creates a legal identity of a
respectable job. This also helps the educated people of the Chhara tribe to live a nondiscriminatory life. As one Chhara lawyer put it, ‘I felt that if they are going to keep calling
us thieves I might as well learn what the law is’ (Friedman, 2010). There are more than 170
advocates in the community. However, almost 60% to 70% people brew illicit liquor for their
livelihood in the community which is illegal in the dry state of Gujarat. Around 20% still
have to earn their livelihood by committing petty crimes, as there are no jobs. It does not
matter if they are educated or illiterate due to the stigma of being the member of an excriminal tribe. This may be a reason why Chharanagar is an infamous area of the city which
most non-residents are afraid to visit. Like community, the identity of the particular area
where the Chharas live is also stigmatised and creates a negative mind-set within mainstream
society. Some people do petty jobs to educate and feed their children. After independence, in
the absence of any policy framed by the government for their socio-economic alleviation and
acceptance by mainstream society, the Chharas continue to live a stigmatized existence even
after several decades of being de-notified. They had no other option but to revert to thieving
or brewing illicit liquor. Brewing illicit liquor, known as Daru, was a traditional art but in
absence of any respectable livelihood after independence, it became a profession of the
community. The state of Gujarat is a dry state and to brew illicit liquor is illegal. Until the
1970s, almost all the people of the Chhara community were engaged in thieving and brewing
illicit liquor but during 1980s, slowly people started sending their children to the schools
because they did not want them to also follow the same illegal work for their livelihood.
Instead, they wanted their children to secure good jobs, via education and to live a
respectable life. Following my grandfather, my father also used to be a thief but he never
wanted me to follow his profession; instead, he gave me and my siblings the best possible
education for our future. During the 1980s, every parent wanted this change in for the next
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generation. This is a unique and significance element of transformation through education in
the Chhara tribe’s history.
Traditionally, Chharas used to be traditional entertainers, such as street singers and dancers.
However, for the colonial administration, these street performers were always under
surveillance because they believed that the women of the Kanjar tribe (Chhara) entered into
the town or village in parties, sung and danced to gather information which they then passed
on to their males so that they could plan a robbery (Gunthorpe, 1882, p. 84). In contrast,
Dadi, a Kanjar (Chhara) woman stated in the documentary film Acting like a Thief (2009) that
they were nomads and for livelihood they danced by putting a pot on their head and sword in
the hand and in return people gave them grains. In this honest occupation, they could feed
their families. Gunthorpe’s colonial imaginative observation may have led to the Kanjar
tribe’s notification as Criminal Tribe. Even after independence, their colourful traditional
dance attracted many mainstream people and scholars: Ragini Devi, a renowned Indian
classical dancer from the United States of America was attracted by the Chhara women’s
traditional folk dance talent while on her visit to Ahmedabad city during the 1960s. She
invited Chhara women for their dance performance in town and soon after the show finished,
the headman of the community asked for a certificate of performance to show to the local
police, as it was already sunset and they were told by police to go back to their camp before
sundown (Devi, 1972, p. 19). Even after independence, Chharas had to prove their presence
to the local police station as members of ex-criminal tribes.
In the section above, I have discussed historical accounts of India’s nomadic tribes and the
colonial imagination/politics behind their definition as criminal tribes under the inhuman
Criminal Tribes Act. I have also talked about the so-called reformatory settlements where
they were kept as bonded labourers in the name of rehabilitation and were exploited
physically, emotionally and economically. I have also fleshed out a brief history of the
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Chhara tribe as, historically, an entertainer community and its current social and political
stigma as criminal tribe which was imposed by the history. In a later section, I will discuss
the brief history of Indian social theatre and the use of theatre art by the Chhara youth and
children to overcome historical stigma and will see how they used theatre for their own
liberation.
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Chapter 4 – Liberation Theory and the Indian Social Theatre Movement
During the eighteenth century, there were many nomadic communities in India which used to
travel from one place to another to entertain people. For example, Nats for acrobats, Kanjars
for singing and dance shows Nayak for Bhavai (Folk Theatre), Charans for religious singing,
Snake Charmers for snake shows, Kalandars for monkey shows, etc. They lived a nomadic
life and carried their cultures and traditions wherever they travelled.
In most of the country the professional mummers who were nomads would travel in the
village, like the potters or the weavers, form a caste on their own, variously named Bhands,
Nakals and Mirasia. They were itinerant players who visited the houses of the peasants on
marriage, birth, and festival, regaling the audience with jokes and songs and recitals for which
they were paid in kind, but kept at an orthodox distance, being regarded more or less as
untouchables (Anand, 1950, p. 13).
Srampickal (1994) also mentions that nomadic people carry with them, their oral traditions
and culture, and share a cultural heritage, described variously as folk culture. Entertainer
tribes were the only source of entertainment for rural audiences and they always welcomed
them. “Some tribes had greater talents than the others in representations of scenes and could
stir up emotions in the audience as well, rouse in them love and war, or make them laugh. In
the interplay between the actors and the audience, the theatre was born” (Anand, 1950 p. 19).
In India, Calcutta was the first city which was ruled by the British where the enactment of the
Permanent Settlement Act in 1795 created a new class of absentee landlord popularly known
as the Bhadra log. (Srampickal, 1994). He states that under the British rule, the Indian
education system was rapidly changing and simultaneously, Indian Theatre was also
changing. Before the British, there was theatre, but in the form of rituals, as discussed earlier.
The British imported writers and producers to produce British classical plays in India.
Indians, educated in Western pedagogy, began to produce and write English plays. The
purpose of promoting English culture was ‘to create a class of people who would be Indian in
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blood and colour but English in taste, opinions, values and intellect’ (Macaulay, 1945). This
was a planned act by the colonial regime to invade Indian culture and impose their language
and theatre culture. Only Bhadra log (elite people) were allowed to see theatre but not the
common men. Bhadra log means those people who were English speaking Indians and were
under the influence of British culture. This cultural invasion was unbearable for Calcutta
based writers and in 1833, Bengali theatre was founded in the house of Nabin Chandra Basu
with the performance of Neel-darpana, written by Dinbandhu Mitra in 1833 based on sociopolitical realities and struggles. People found new expression in the play. The play was highly
successful and welcomed by the common men. Following these kinds of patriotic plays, in
1876, the Great National Theatre produced the play titled Gajadananda O Yubaraj (Gaja and
the Prince) and performed it on 19th February in the same year (Bharucha, 1983, p. 21-22).
He explores how the play criticized Bengali lawyer Jagadananda Ray who had invited the
Prince of Wales to visit his house and meet his family members in Calcutta. A stir among
Bengali intellectuals was that Jagadananda permitted the Prince to see ladies in his house who
welcomed him in an Indian traditional way. Culturally, this was unbearable in the, then,
Bengal and the Prince’s visit was mercilessly criticized in the Great National Theatre
production. It was obvious that the British administration of India could not tolerate satires
about the Prince of Wales and soon after first performance, the then viceroy, Lord
Northbrook issued an ordinance on February 29, 1976 to authorize Bengal government to
‘prohibit certain dramatic performances which are scandalous, defamatory, seditious, obscene
or otherwise prejudicial to the public interest’ (Bharucha, 1983, p. 23). However, theatre was
so effective that the regime had to introduce the Dramatic Control Act in India. It was the
first non-violent cultural resistance against the British regime who were politically threatened
by the effects of performance art in India.
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4.1 Post colonialism, SAGs and the theatre of the street
The first political theatre movement during the 1940s was not inspired by the independence
movement but rather by Marxist ideology. Theatre became a nationwide movement with the
foundation of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in 1942 which was the cultural
wing of the Communist Party of India (Srampickal, 1994). The model of the IPTA was folk
theatre but IPTA members faced many problems in working with rural folk forms, as they
were ignorant about the condition of life in the villages and also they did not know the
languages spoken in rural areas (Bharucha, 1983). Meanwhile, Bengal faced terrible famine
which was a result of negligence on the part of the ruling class in which 3 million people
died. Based on famine, Bijon Bhattacharya, founder of IPTA, wrote the play Nabanna (New
Harvest) in 1944 which became a milestone of Indian socio-political theatre, which Bharucha
(1983) describes as being ‘radical in form and content, terrifyingly honest in its depiction of
suffering, and daringly innovative in its use of language and stagecraft’ (p. 44).
Unfortunately, IPTA could not sustain itself long and was disbanded after Independence in
1947. It also split from the communists due to political differences and turned into small units
nationwide. The tradition of IPTA was carried forward by some of its key members and well
known theatre practitioners like Habib Tanveer, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Tripurari Sharma
and Badal Sircar who later began to develop community theatres (Srampickal, 1994).
During the 1950s to 1970s, IPTA members used street theatre to raise consciousness among
people for socio-political issues. Badal Sircar called this theatre form ‘third theatre’ to
differentiate it from westernized proscenium theatre and folk theatre, but drawing from both’
(Srampickal, 1994 p. 105) and all over India this form was considered as ‘epitome of
conscientious and experimental theatre’ (Srampickal, 1994, p. 105). The street theatre form
was one of the easiest and the most powerful theatre forms to raise the voice of the common
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man’s social and political issues. It is a theatre form which is ‘inexpensive, flexible, portable,
yet imaginative, challenging the aesthetic notions and social sense of the audience’
(Srampickal, 1994, p. 109-110). Normally, street theatre performances happen in a circle
which Southern (1965) argues was the original and natural shape of theatre. A circle gives a
feel to the audience that the performer or performance is not different from them as both are
on same level. Srampickal (1994) states that, in India, which is a diverse country, and where
there are hundreds of languages and dialects and a high degree of illiteracy, street theatre is
‘versatile and adaptable, cheap and mobile and has tremendous potential’ (p. 101) and has
become a voice of the common man.
During the 1960s-70s, theatre activists felt that workshops were too short of communities and
had an inadequate follow up and due to that the villagers’ ‘enthusiasm soon runs dry and
conscientization remains only skin-deep’ (Srampickal, 1994 p. 51). A good solution for this
were the Social Action Groups (SAGs) founded by young people in the villages. The SAG
plays were ‘the simplest, short, open-ended pieces, performed in villages and usually
addressing topical and local areas of concerns’ (Srampickal and Boon, 1998, p. 137) Theatre
was made in villages with the help of peasants who performed shows on a regular basis.
These groups accepted theatre as a larger organizational process of development for the
people and they involved communities directly in this process for social and political change
(Srampickal, 1994, p. 51).
IPTA member, Habib Tanveer developed SAG theatre with the tribes of Chhattisgarh, who
could not read or write. He named his community theatre ‘Naya Theatre’ (New Theatre).
Naya Theatre began a new trend in the commercial theatre which was performed by nontrained traditional peasant actors. Due to Habib Tanveer, peasant actors also got space on
mainstream stages as well in rural Indian performing platforms. These people followed Freire
and Boal’s two dimensions of action and reflection theories in which peasants (the oppressed)
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come into a dialogical process with the oppressed who traditionally thought that his oppressor
was superior to him and thus, he could not find his own voice to break the vicious circle of
oppression (Freire, 2005, p. 65-66). Through action and reflection, a dialog was initiated that
engaged community people in ‘participation, democratic decentralization and collective
management’ (Srampickal, 1994, p. 165) of theatre processes which led them towards
liberation. This way, the entire process became one of education and an essential element in
the act of conscientization of actors and spectators. There were many issues to run SAGs in
the villages like, funding, factions within a village, the quality of production, its
entertainment quality, violence from landlords or political goons and the livelihood issue of
law caste actors in the upper caste and landlord dominant society. Despite all these issues,
SAGs were very much active till the 1980s. This grassroots movement created enormous
energy among peasants to speak, perform and have open discussion about their social and
political problems (Srampickal and Boon, 1998, p. 137).
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Chapter 5 – Foundation of Budhan Theatre and Its plays for liberation
from the historical stigmatization
By the end of the 1980s, there was a growing movement among the youth of Chharanagar
and there was a possibility to develop SAG within the Chhara community. As mentioned
above, 90% of the people were doing illegal jobs but almost all the families of the Chhara
Tribe sent children to the school. As people of the Chhara tribe did not have social or political
acceptance, there were no livelihood options for them and people had to commit petty crimes
for sustenance. Despite this, there was positive energy among the youth and their parents.
This was a time when people were literally afraid to come to Chharanagar due to its image
as an area of criminals and, surprisingly, during this time, a renowned street theatre director
Dr. Prem Prakash came to Chharanagar in search of actors. I had discussed the beginning of
theatre in Chharanagar with him and he said that during the 1980s, he was making the play
Spartacus written by Badal Sarcar and wanted actors who could play the role of slaves. His
other actors were fair and therefore they did not look like slaves. He shared his problem with
the Chhara painter Mansing Chhara about the need for actors who look like slaves and he sent
some actors from the Chhara tribe who had the physical appearance of slaves.
Spartacus was based on a slaves uprising against the unjust political system of the Roman
regime (Sarkar, 1972). These actors from Chharanagar, in the very first staging of the play,
stunned Ahmedabad’s theatre world. This was the first time a play of Badal Sircar’s was
performed in the state of Gujarat. The viewers were astonished to see the play of the third
world called Nukkad Natak (Street Play). We can see in the picture below the first generation
of Chhara actors, performing Spartacus at the Visual Art Centre of Ahmedabad city.
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(Figure 4) The play – Spartacus, 1980, The Chhara actors Sardarbhai, Prahladbhai and
others, Visual Art Centre, Ahmedabad.
Source: Prakash, 2005.
It was the first time that the way of looking at Chharas, commonly seen as thieves, changed.
There were many shows of this play, and slowly all the artists evolved into experienced
actors. Theatre activity was shaping as SAG in the Chhara community. But as always,
financial and social responsibilities distanced these actors from theatre. The Chhara
community people were about to take on a new identity but the theatrical process was halted.
There was no community leadership which could sustain theatre in the community.
Nevertheless, the play Spartacus became the foundation of the theatre activity in the Chhara
community and it was the first ever attempt in which mainstream people came to know about
the acting talent of the Chhara people.
Prem Prakash planted the seeds of Theatre in the community. Spartacus was a political
discourse about issues of labour in general but community actors did not have an in-depth
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understanding about it, because during the 1980s, Chhara people were not employed as
labour due to the criminal tribe stigma. The performance as slaves expressed the life of their
ancestors who worked as slaves in the settlements and were forced to be slaves of landlords
due to the roll-call system by village headmen for CTA members. Influenced by Prem
Prakash’s theatre work, many youngsters from the community made plays on topics such as
Bhantar Matti Khai Raha (No use of education), based on community thought about
education and an unemployment issue. Also, it portrayed that, despite education amongst the
people of the Chhara community, oppressive practices still persist, such as that of staging a
virginity test of brides on the first night after marriage. Iske Jawabdar Hamij (We are
responsible) was based on women’s issues within the community and exploitation in the
police station; also it exposed local community council exploitation. These plays talked about
the community issues and tried to create awareness among community people about
development issues. The language of these plays was the community dialect, Bhantu. Plays
were performed free in a street theatre form at public space of community where almost 200
to 300 people could gather during late evenings. By the late 1980s, the community actors
could understand the use and power of theatre.
During the 1990s, Prakash again came to Chharanagar and began another play called Julus,
written by Badal Sircar. I was involved in this production as an actor. We began the
rehearsals. Those were bitterly cold winter days and the rehearsals were held in the courtyard
of the school. The primary school had no electricity. So we would rehearse in the light of two
or three lanterns. None of us had the discipline required for theatre. We would laugh when
somebody spoke a dialogue. After a long process, many other community actors were
selected for the play. We would all meet in the evening. It was very cold. But when, in the
light of the lanterns, he would ask us to do various physical compositions, we would begin to
sweat even in the bitter cold. He would not allow us any rest during the rehearsals. I felt very
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strange when at the end of every page he would ask us to play a new character and a new
composition. We rehearsed for three months in the dim light of those lanterns. Around 75%
of the play was ready when suddenly the rehearsals stopped. There were some irregularities
in the rehearsals. The theatre group was developing in a typical community set up, in which
community actors who may have had some social or economic problems, occasionally gave
less priority to rehearsals – a situation which stopped the rehearsals after a few months.
However, the training that we got during the making of the play Julus became the basic
platform for actors like us and helped us to carry on theatre activities in the coming years.
The social revolution that this whole process started in the Chhara community is the theme
of the next section of this thesis. Theatre gave immense power to the Chhara youth to speak
against the injustice done to the community. Only a few youths from the community were
committed to transform the oppressive system but it had its impact on the entire community.
As Da’Costa (2010) observed, ‘Chhara youth who are part of BT have gained access to
education, employment in non-criminal livelihoods like journalism and the culture industry,
and became community leaders living the imagined possibility of an alternative social future’
(p. 623).
Primarily, Budhan Theatre was founded to transform the historical identity of the community
and its people. As people came closer to the community by performances, media, films,
scholarly articles, institutional relationships, discussions, it helped them to understand each
other with more clarity and develop a feeling of compassion for each other. It resulted in a
greater acceptance of Chhara youths and it opened up livelihood options for them. For
example, the actors of Budhan Theatre Alok and Vivek came to be trained in the National
School of Drama and both are now working as professional actors in the field of film and
theatre; Roxy Gagdekar became a crime journalist in one of the most reputed newspaper
called Daily News Analysis (DNA); Kalpana Gagdekar is working in TV and film industry as
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an actor; Aatish is now an MA student in theatre arts and also working as a professional actor
in theatre; Tushar Kodekar is leading TV anchor in crime based programmes on a regional
TV channel called TV9; Ankur Garange is also working on the same TV channel as a crime
script writer; Jeetendra earlier worked as casting director in New York based film maker’s
film called Patang and later worked as a theatre trainer to the children of riots affected in
Ahmedabad and other children who lived in extreme poverty, working with many city based
theatre groups; Ankur studied the language of de-notified tribes across the state of Gujarat
and published the first pictorial glossary of his own language called Bhantu; a gang of around
40 child actors started expressing their personal and social concerns through theatre. The
youth of the community are slowly improving their employment prospects in various sectors
like police, journalism, call centres and in the local shops. However, it is difficult to assess
whether this development of new modes of economic change is entirely an impact of Budhan
Theatre. The latter is, for sure, the only activity in Chharanagar which has carried out regular
sensitization through debates and performances over the year on a large scale and which is
always in the regional and national media news. On a visit to Budhan Theatre, Da Costa
(2010) notes her experience: ‘Budhan Theatre’s
explicit aspiration to transform from
criminal to respectable creative community takes the Chhara away from a history of thieving
(and living against the rule of private property) and towards accomplishing the rule of
capitalist development through assimilation into middle-class futures’.
The journey of community theatre, in a more proper sense, began in 1998. Tribal activist and
literary critique Ganesh Devy and Bengali writer Mahasveta Devi came to Chharanagar.
They started a small community library with the help of the community’s youth. Meanwhile,
the judgement from the Calcutta High Court about the killing of Budhan Sabar appeared in
the quarterly magazine called Budhan. Budhan was a person who belonged to the Sabar denotified tribe of the West Bengal and was brutally beaten up by West Bengal police and then
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sent to judicial custody, where he died due to severe injuries in the head and chest (Devi,
1998, p. 69). The judgement came that Budhan Sabar had brutally beaten up in the police
custody and that this beating was the cause of his death. The police officers involved were
suspended and compensation was awarded to the widow of Budhan Sabar. (ibid). This
judgement was remarkable for the rest of de-notified tribes in sustaining their faith in the
Indian judiciary. The founder of the Budhan Theatre, Dr. Devy, suggested to Chhara youth to
prepare a play based on the judgement. The community youth came together in the small
library and started rehearsals. They adopted the street theatre form, which they had learned
during the making of the play Julus. From the community group, I was assigned to write the
play. Budhan’s brutal killing and my community’s daily encounter with legal system and
judiciary were similar. To pen the incidents related to Budhan Sabar was similar to writing
daily notes of my observations and the discriminatory life of our parents. We were not
financially sound to arrange for the money, props, lights, costumes, make-up and space which
were required for the play. We only had our bodies and voices to express Budhan’s killing
and our daily encounter with the legal system and the judiciary. Grotowski (1968) explained
the very nature of poor theatre form, that the reception of poverty in theatre, uncovered all
that is not indispensable to it, exposed to us not only the backbone of the medium, but also
the deep richness of the art form (p. 21). Unknowingly, we were following Grotowskian
(1968) idea of the poor theatre against ‘synthetic theatre’ which includes ‘literature,
sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, and acting (under the direction of a metteur-enscene)’ which he calls ‘nonsense’ (p. 19). He suggests to avoid any ‘bag of tricks’ and use
techniques of the ‘trance’ during performance, by ‘ripening’ of the actor, which is expressed
by a tension towards the extreme, by a complete ‘stripping’ down, by laying bare of one’s
own intimacy (Grotowski, 1968, p. 16). He asserts:
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Can the theatre exist without costumes and sets? Yes, it can.
Can it exist without music to accompany the plot? Yes.
Can it exist without lighting effects? Of course.
And without a text? Yes. The history of the theatre conforms this.
But without Actor, it doesn’t. It can’t (p. 32).
So, we had only actors and their bodies to express our historical stigmatization – a situation
which had caused Budhan’s death. Along with community people and many eminent people
around the world, Ganesh Devy witnessed the first performance of the play Budhan on 31st
August 1998 when the first International Convention of De-Notified and Nomadic tribes was
organised at Chharanagar. In an interview in the documentary film titled Actors are born here
(2008), Devy stated about the play Budhan, ‘I believe that it was not an enjoyable play or it
was not the play to perform on the stage, in fact, I don’t believe that it was the play at all. I
think the play was associated with the life experience of the community and slowly, it was
getting the voice and that voice had dramatic form’. He further explained that in the first
performance of Budhan, ‘There was hardly anybody in the audience who did not feel
profoundly moved to see the Chhara youths enacting the entire Budhan Sabar case, with what
passion, with what easy do they act, these Chhara boys and girls!’ (Devy, 2006, p. 26). The
Chhara youth got the medium to express their socio-political issues, thoughts and a nonviolent weapon to resist the state and to ask for their constitutional rights. Constitutional
rights such a freedom of movement, social, political and economic reservation, dignity and
security of their human rights. Accustomed to being imprisoned, beaten, extorted and
humiliated over the decades, a cumulative anger has always burned within the Chharas
(Malekar, 2009). Punished once by the past, and twice by the people who unkindly keep in
mind their history, Chhara youth are to a great extent looking for a path to break through the
inhuman circle of a criminalized identity.
The play became more significant when at the end of it Chhara actors asked the audience
thrice in a chorus; ‘are we second class citizens?’ and then they asserted their appeal to their
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audiences; ‘we want respect’ (Bajrange, 2010, p. 30). Devy (2006) notes, ‘Budhan had
become a myth and symbol of India’s vast community of vulnerable and victimised. A man, a
name, and a symbol: Budhan. So do myths spring up and grow. And so do they carry within
them such pain!’ (p. 27).
5.1
The play - Budhan
‘Stigmatised, denied political representation, employment opportunities and welfare, Chhara
face multiple structural and normative limits on their livelihood choices, life chances, and
options for a viable alternate identity’ (Da Costa, 2010, P. 621 ). Identity can be something to
be proud of for most but for DNTs, it is not. Since my childhood, I was confused about why
people hated us. Why did other children seem distant to me? Why was my sister blamed for
stealing the marbles of the other girl and insulted in the classroom by the teacher and fellow
classmates? Why do my community people brew illicit liquor as it is an illegal job? There
were lots of why’s in my head and I found an answer when I was writing the play Budhan and
the answer was colonial invented identity. In India, belonging to a certain section of society
can be a matter of pride such as Brahmin and Baniyas, but to belong to any of the de-notified
tribes creates a negative identity for the person and it has roots in history, explained in an
earlier section.
The issues raised by the Chhara actors; ‘Are we second class citizens’? and ‘we need respect’
were direct political questions to the audiences. Our audiences were government policy
makers, police officials, school and college students, academics, artists, writers and common
men. When they watched the play, they were stunned to see violence in the play and we
could feel immediate empathy towards DNT issues. For us, our audience was not like a
normal theatre audience; we believed our audiences as the state and the people with whom
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we never had a chance to have discourse about our suffering. Budhan was clearly an
expression of experiences of being a member of a stigmatized community which I and my
colleagues had witnessed since our childhood. People have been tortured and discriminated
against by the police and mainstream people and they were facing all the sufferings mutely. It
seems that community people were seeking their voice to be heard and incidentally they
found theatre. While writing and directing the play Budhan, I neither had a sense to be
politically correct nor any particular awareness about politics, aesthetics, grammar and
various forms of theatre. We did not even know that we could bring community development
through theatre. The play Budhan was becoming an identity of group of people who were
isolated and discriminated against by society and the government system.
Budhan was a realistic play and we were invited by many organizations and institutions to
perform it in different communities, seminars, cultural gatherings, schools, and colleges.
Whenever and wherever we performed, we found enormous emotional reaction from the
audience. The people who had negative thoughts about the Chhara community and who were
afraid of the community people, they cried out, hugged the actors, shook hands with them and
became enthusiastic to know more about our lives and issues. The play Budhan produced
catharsis. ‘Aristotle wrote that catharsis comes about through the imitation of pity and Fear’
(Elicker, 2008 p. 8). The lives of DNTs are terribly pitiful and they are living constantly
under fear of state scrutiny. It was an imitation of their own anguish in dramatic form which
aimed to change the consciousness of the spectators. The actors’ own anguish came out as
tragic emotions of their life experiences and observations. Elicker (2008) quotes Nussbaum
who argues that catharsis should be seen as education of the emotions, explaining “Through
their pity and fear, indeed in those responses, spectators attain a deeper understanding of the
world in which they must live.” (p. 8) Nussbaum views catharsis as a way in which audience
achieve a deeper understanding of the emotions and these emotions shed light on the world in
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which we live. After watching the play, people came to know about the pathetic conditions of
de-notified tribes and by watching, feeling and sensitising themselves through the imitations
of emotions of suffering, people realized about the unknown, unexplored and isolated
sections of society. Ranciere (2009) also adds a concluding remark of Plato on the
understanding of the emancipated spectator - that theatre is the place where ignoramuses are
invited to witness people suffering. What the dramatic scene offers them is the manifestation
of pity, the expression of an illness, that of desire and suffering – that is to say, the selfdivision which derives from ignorance (p. 3). The ignoramus spectators encounter the
suffering of a particular community by watching the performances of Budhan Theatre.
(Figure 5) The Chhara actors Atish, Nakul, Ankur and Jitendra are performing the play
Budhan on the streets of Ahmedabad city. Source: Budhan Theatre, 2010.
Through theatre, many social and political sections are allied with Budhan Theatre and they
come into discourse with each other whether emotionally or in a dialogue form. Instead of
money, this was our reward after the performance of Budhan. No award or remuneration was
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involved, just emotional exchange between actors and spectators. Every emotional exchange
and appreciation inspired us to perform more shows in search of the people who could
understand us. We performed in various places, cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bhopal, Chennai,
Hyderabad etc. After so many performances, in 2007, the police officials of state of Gujarat
organized the performance of the play Budhan in Karai police training academy. Dr.
Friedman and Talukdar captured the moments in their video documentary film titled Please
don’t beat me Sir (2011) of this show. Almost 100 trainee police officials and some high
ranking police officials were in the audience. Devy (2006) says that no one knows whether
the police training academies in India still educate trainees that certain communities are
habitual criminals but the ‘CT is very much part of the syllabus leading to the discussion of
crime watch’ (Devy, 2006, p. 22). Police officials and people in general had been taught to
look towards certain communities as Born Criminals and that attitude still prevails (Devy,
2006, p. 22). It was a remarkable day for Chhara actors when they performed the play
Budhan which included some of the atrocious incidents carried out by police on the denotified tribes across the state. It was clearly an anti-police play. We performed with great
energy as it was the first time we were performing in front of the oppressors who were key
officials in the legal system which oppressed de-notified tribes. We thought there would be a
negative reaction from the audience but surprisingly, we received lots of appreciation from
them. After the performance, an IPS officer and the then Inspector General of Police
(Railways and Crime) of Crime Investigation Department (CID) of state of Gujarat IPS,
Keshav Kumar asked to the audience; ‘After seeing this play, I humbly request that we take
an oath: That when we encounter a Chhara to arrest them or interrogate them, such scenes
should not occur. I want you to lift your hands and swear. If you have trust in this, you should
raise your both hands’ (Please don’t beat me Sir, 2011) the next shot in the film was all of the
audience in the hall raising their both of their hands. After watching the play, police hugged
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the Chhara youth, some cried, shook hands and told us ‘it was a good play’ (Please don’t beat
me Sir, 2011). These were unexpected words for the actors to whom the spectators were
trained to regard as born criminals. Unknowingly, the Chhara actors were trying to transform
the consciousness of their oppressors to break the atrocious and vicious cycle of violence and
inhuman treatment by performing the reality of their life. It was the first ever positive
dialogue between the Chhara community and police. Gandhi believed that dialogue between
the oppressors and the oppressed would bring both of them towards the truth which helps for
the solution of disputes (Parekh, 2001). If we see dialogical theory in education, Freire (1987)
also says that dialogue is the historical nature of human beings and is a part of our historical
progress in becoming human (p. 98). He suggests that through dialogue, reflecting together
on what we know and don’t know, we can then act critically to transform reality (p. 99). The
Suffering of the Chhara community was a reality which needed to be transformed by actors
and their spectators and that can be possible with effective dialogue between them to stop the
vicious circle of domination because ‘Dialogue is a challenge to existing domination’ (Freire,
1987, p. 99). The existing domination was the police and people’s prejudicial and
discriminatory behaviour to whom Fanon (1990) describes ‘the spokesmen of the settler and
his rule of oppression’ (p. 29). Domination can be ended by true education but Bookish and
informative knowledge of the object is not enough for true education; the object which is
known must be put on the table between the two subjects of knowing. So knowing becomes
personal experience based knowledge and that gives true education to encounter with the
reality of subject (Shor and Freire, 1987, p. 99). The Chharas turned their suffering into
pedagogy. Education about criminal tribes was just bookish knowledge for training police
officers but when they see this subject as an object (as physical performance) in the play and
encounter the suffering of people due to imposed criminality, they may understand the reality
of the subject, and feel motivated for dialogue.
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(Figure 6) The Chhara actor Roxy Gagdekar performing torture scene of Budhan by the
police Source: Budhan Theatre, 2010.
The performance of Budhan was the truth of the Chharas’ life in particular and DNTs in
general and by watching it, audiences came to know about their question regarding their
citizenship: ‘are we second class citizens?’ (Bajramge, 2010, p. 30). The play depicted their
suffering in life and posed political questions about their citizenship. Schwarz (2010)
observed that it is extremely disturbing to watch Budhan being administered electric shocks
in Jail. The stage direction is: Budhan begins to tremble. His eyes roll. Saliva drips from his
mouth. The actor writhes and screams, flinging spittle; his body is wracked with seemingly
intolerable tremors as he rolls in the dust of the performance space. There was a lot of
suffering but for the Chharas, to see the police as their enemy was not a solution. Their
oppressors were also human beings who loved their family, children, and friends but there
was a need to expand their love which was limited to a few people. The spectator’s reaction,
especially an oath taken by more than 100 police officials was an attempt to break the vicious
cycle of oppression and expand their sensitivity and consciousness towards the particular
stigmatised section which they had oppressed.
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Schwarz (2010) did an interesting analysis of Budhan Theatre’s aesthetics of survival and its
politics of liberation. He made a comparison of Budhan’s death scene and Fanon’s ghosts of
the ancestors to repossess colonization. Budhan is locked up and tortured. Slipping on the
floor and experiencing extreme pain in his body, suddenly some actors walked in ghostly
fashion on the stage, rhythmically chanting Budhan..O...Budhan and they surrounded him in
a circle and chanted in high pitched voices ‘Budhan is a thief, Accept your crime, Beat the
scoundrel, Give him electric shocks, Drive him mad, The dark Cell’. Budhan was shivering
and stunned by these ghostly attacks and after repeating the same line a couple of times they
raised their voices chanting Death, death, death and Budhan died. He observed that these
ghosts are part of an official history from the anti-thugee campaign to the Habitual Offenders
Act (HOA) who are constantly torturing innocent people and additionally, present law and
order becomes like a death for the de-notified tribes of India. He further states that Acting
out forced label, Budhan Theatre turns the trope of lawful identity into performance,
performing their own persecution as the device to undo it. Through theatrical productions
aimed at the sources of law and order, Budhan Theatre strives to be seen as the history of the
imagination that fashioned thugee and which led to the criminalization of such huge numbers
(Schwarz, 2010, p. 113).
In a true sense, the play Budhan initiated the process of emancipation of actors and spectators
as well.
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5.2
The Death of Pinya Hari Kale
In 1998, another de-notified tribal was killed in police custody in the Baramati district of
state of Maharashtra, south-west part of India. Piya Hari Kale belonged to the Pardhi tribe
which is one of the de-notified tribes in India and they too were treated as hardcore criminals
by the legal and judiciary system. They are always a soft target when a robbery or theft takes
place in the state. Pardhis were forest dwellers and great hunters but now due to forest law,
they cannot enter the forest to forage or hunt. It is restricted and illegal according to the act.
D’Souza (1998) notes in his study on Pardhis that Pinya Hari Kale was an agricultural
landless worker and working as a daily wages labourer to feed his wife and five children and
his monthly salary was Rs. 1000 (approximately £15). On June 8, 1998, Pinya was picked up
by the local police when he was in the local market to purchase flour mill to cook dinner. He
did not return home. Next morning the police summoned his wife Chandrasena to the police
station and there she found her husband dead. Police reported that during the round up, he
escaped, fell down and immediately died. Post mortem reports were prepared, forged by
doctors, police and an executive magistrate – something that was revealed on investigation by
Inspector B N Mane of the Crime Investigation Department (CID) of state of Maharashtra. A
second post mortem was requested by Chandrasena. In the second post mortem, ‘The doctor
found evidence of multiple contusions and issued the statement that Kale had died due to
many deadly injuries with evidence of head injury (D'Souza, 1998). He further quotes
NHRC’s statements regarding Pinya’s case that ‘This is a fit case’ (D'Souza, 1998), the
NHRC observed, for awarding compensation to his dependents. NHRC ordered for interim
compensation worth of Rs. 2,00,000 (approximately £3000) to the widow of Pinya Hari Kale.
He mentioned that Pinya Hari Kale was killed because he belonged to the Pardhi de-notified
tribe who are treated as Born Criminals.
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Pinya Hari Kale’s custodial death was similar to the Budhan Sabar case. When we came to
know about this incident, we decided to make our second play on the death of Pinya Hari
Kale. In 2001, Justice N. Venkatachaliah, the then Chairman of National Human Rights
Commission (NHRC) of India was visiting Baroda city of the state of Gujarat to deliver the
Verrier Elwin Lecture, organized by Bhasha organization. We performed the play The Death
of Pinya Hari Kale in the lobby of the auditorium, witnessed by around 300 elite class people
of Baroda city. This time again, a very emotional response from the audience took place as
they watched the enactment of Pinya Hari Kale’s interrogation and brutality by police just
because he belonged to one of the de-notified tribes. After watching the play, Justice
Venkatachaliah immediately went away from the performance area. We were surprised to see
this kind of reaction from our main spectator for whom we were performing as he was head
of the human rights affairs in India and to sensitize him would be helpful for the human rights
protection of de-notified tribes. We thought he may not have liked the play but later we came
to know that he was deeply moved. He maybe did not want to show his emotional reaction in
the public and that’s why he immediately left the performance space. Ranciere (2009) rightly
suggests that ‘More than any other art, theatre has been associated with the Romantic idea of
an aesthetic revolution, changing not the mechanics of the state and laws, but the sensible
forms of human experience’ (p. 6). That’s exactly what happened after the performance.
Subsequently, as Chairperson for the National Commission to Review the Working of the
Indian Constitution, he wrote a special section in his review describing the situation of the
DNTs3
There was no participation of spectators in the theatrical action but there was certainly
emotional inter-action from either side. For us, the theatrical action in uneven space was
certainly not for entertainment; it was direct catharsis of Pinya Hari Kale’s brutal killing.
The text can be found in the Technical Advisory Group’s report available at:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/933435/TAG-Report , p. 108
3
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When I was writing this play, I was not aware of the legality of this custodial case but I had
read an application of Pinya Hari Kale’s widow explaining the entire event and asking for the
justice from the then Chief Minister of the state of Maharashtra Gopinath Munde. The write
up of an application appeared in the Budhan newsletter4. There was no imagination required
to write the script, it was the affected victim’s statement and we enacted the statement by
chalking out explained events in the application. Her words became dialogue, her suffering
became our expression and the body movement and death of her loving husband became the
subject of the play. I personally believed that every event of life is theatre and it has
expressions and action. Ranciere (2009) asserted that drama means action. Theatre is a space
where an action is taken to its conclusion by bodies in gesticulation in front of living bodies
that are to be mobilized (p. 3). In our case, there was mobilization but it was certainly an
emotional and intellectual engagement. The people could not take part in the action with us
like a Boalien Forum Theatre for liberation but I assume, some among the spectators
definitely took part for the social, economic and political advocacy of de-notified tribes by
watching Budhan Theatre’s plays. The audiences’ participation/action was distanced but by
watching the suffering they engaged with the issue through theatre. It signifies that theatre is
an ideal community form. It involves an idea of community as self-presence, in contrast to
the distance of presentation (Ranciere, 2009, p. 5).
I repeat, for us, our spectators were not just an audience; they were like the state and we were
expecting respect for us, allowing us to live a life with dignity. They were much more than
just passive spectators.
4
Budhan Newsletter – 1998, published by de-notified and nomadic rights action group, India.
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5.3
Children’s Theatre – Preparing the next generation
We have discussed in previous chapters about the politics of aesthetics of Budhan Theatre
and its politics to perform real life suffering of a community to build new relationships with
the spectators and to establish dialogue with them, to liberate each other. For many years
there was no economy of Budhan theatre group and community people were performing for a
cause. The actors included school children, drop out children, college youth and some school
and college girls. The Community Library which was run by the Budhan Theatre group, was
struggling to continue due to lack of income. Apart from acting, actors were also involved in
non-formal teaching in the school going and for drop out children. Senior Actors trained
children and made skit plays on the community’s internal issues like child marriage,
cleanliness, consequences of consuming alcohol, widows’ social problems, consequences of
being thieves, discrimination in the schools, the importance of the library, exploitation by
community council and of course police brutality on their parents. The girls, Poonam, Sonam,
and Urvashi performed dramas about the child marriage issue in the community – centering
on those who had to get married at a young age. This was certainly unfortunate but for the
first time in the community, the girls themselves resisted their parents and sought not to
marry as children; They were empowered to speak against evil traditions but parental
pressure became too high and they had to marry. I think this was a failure of Budhan
Theatre’s creative intervention in the community that if anything is going on wrong in the
community, they could not directly interfere in the issue due to social bindings. But Budhan
Theatre definitely tried to put evil traditions into their community plays to transform its
community people. Whatever little understanding we had about expressing our problems
through theatre, we tried to create forms for the next generation, so that they could use theatre
art for social change within the community, not just merely for entertainment. After 2002,
Theatre with children was a fully autonomous process. They wrote their songs, improvised
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scenes and dialogues, designed their body compositions they even wrote their own plays.
Children’s plays were invited by childs’ rights organizations, schools, colleges, book shops,
other theatre groups and festivals. Child actresses Hardika and Nikul got the best actor
awards in 2008 in a school level drama competition titled Rangaparva. By watching the play,
the media noted,
What power theatre, rightly done, can have! What confidence it can give to the weakest of
weak in society? In a play 'Budhan' as part of Rangaparva-08 , an interschool one-act
competition at Natarani, teenage girls and boys of a deprived section of society at climactic
moments’ walk up close to individuals in the audience, look straight into their eyes and ask
questions regarding injustice to them, which cannot easily be answered. (Desai, 2008).
Their parents consider theatre activity as one of the essential activities for the development of
their children. Journalist Faleiro (2005) did an interesting report in the national newspaper of
India called Tehlka. She quotes one of the Chhara children named Haresh Machrekar: He said
‘Before I joined Budhan, I didn’t have the confidence to speak to big people like you. Now I
do’. It means theatre developed confidence in them to talk with people with whom they
never, previously, had discourse. Before Budhan Theatre’s creative intervention, for others,
the people and children of the community were like aliens. She further adds ‘When there isn’t
a festival or a seminar to attend, they head for the village rangmanch [Stage] — a water tank
cemented over especially for this purpose — and delight their family and friends with their
talent’ (Faleiro, 2005). Below is the picture of our village Rangmunch (Stage) where children
are performing the play.
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(Figure 7) The Chhara child actors Poonal, Rakesh, Sandeep, Jayesh and Akshay performing
on the community stage. Source: Budhan Theatre, 2010.
The media started writing about the library Mahasweta Devi helped set up and the unique
theatre experiment launched with her intervention in Chharanagar. It provided the first ray of
hope for the community living on the margins of society and often banished to the crime
sections of the mainstream media (Malekar, 2009). It doesn’t matter whether children’s
parents engaged in stealing, or bootleggers or brewing liquor, they did not want to involve
their children at all in these illegal activities. For some parents, Budhan Theatre was like a
hope for the development of their children. Whenever we performed, the media always took
note about it and the next day articles appeared in the local newspaper which was motivating
for the group members, and every time a hope was raised that now slowly things are
changing and people are taking serious notes about our isolated community. If things will
change, an acceptance will come and once people and the state accept us as a part of their
society, the future of the next generation will change.
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5.4 Choli Ke Picche Kya hai? (CKPKH) – An experimentation with
space, script and the actors
(Figure 8) Performing suffering in CKPKH by Jitendra, the Chhara actor
Source: Budhan Theatre, 2010.
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Through the media, Budhan Theatre was in conversation with theatre practitioners across the
nations and meanwhile one of the group members named Alok Gagdekar got admission to
India’s most reputed theatre institute – the National School of Drama at New Delhi. He was
the first boy who went for the formal theatre training in the reputed institute of the country
which was motivational for the rest of the group members. Malekar (2009) noted that Alok
Gagdekar's father was once caught by the police simply because his sons were doing theatre.
They were not ready to accept that a boy from this ghetto could get admission. Alok took
rigorous training for three years and then came back to the community. On his return, he
introduced the first stylized play with lots of proscenium theatricality and did
experimentation with space and actors’ movement. For many years, we were performing in
the street theatre form, which is normally a loud theatre. Alok chose to make the play of
Bengali writer and Budhan Theatre’s inspiration Mahasveta Devi: the short story Stan-dahini
(Breast-giver). He decided not to write a script but to perform the original text of the story.
Actors who were used to performing improvised plays on DNT issues had difficulty in
adapting to this new form of theatre. Alok chose dialogical theory to educate actors about
women’s social, religious and physical abuse in the community and had dialogue with them
about how women have been treated as objects in society. He entitled the play Choli ke
picche kya hai? (What is beneath the blouse?).
The central character of the play named Jashoda, after her husband is crippled, becomes a
wet-nurse breast-feeding for an everlasting stream of new-borns of the rich. A surrogate
mother of sorts, forced by her husband and conditions to give birth over and over again just to
keep the milk flowing, Jashoda rebels. Ironically, she succumbed to breast cancer, alone,
breast-less, with not a single surrogate “son” to light her pyre. Under Alok Gangedkar’s
direction it was perhaps pertinent that Jashoda be played not by one but two male actors who
had observed sexual exploitation of women by men in their community. Actors were
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symmetrically moving on-stage throughout. We have been working to transform actors and
spectators but this time we decided to transform our space which is also stigmatized as a
criminal hub. Below is the picture of rehearsal and performance space.
(Figure 9) The rehearsal and performance space of CKPKH. Actors, Jitendra, Tushar,
Sandeep, Ankur, Kalpana, Aatish and Kranti.Source: Budhan Theatre, 2010.
We premiered the play in front of community spectators, especially women at the space that
was infamous for illegal gambling5. The audience was mixed, including both men and
women. Spectators watched Jashoda’s daily forced sexual assault by her lame man for her
everlasting pregnancy to feed the Shahukars (Landlords) children. She got frustrated and
quarrelled, and they were abusive to each other. In the entire play, the actors were not looking
to each other but instead they were constantly looking at the audiences like they were telling
The play can be watched in the documentary film Please, Don’t beat me Sir, Directed by Shashwati
Talukdar and Kerim Friedman, half-nine pictures, US.
5
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the story to them directly, in person, and in that way they were trying to keep them engaged
in to witness various types of domestic violence faced by women. The oppressed and the
oppressor were both watching a forced sex scene and witnessing suffering of women which
may have been their daily experience. Quarrelling and abusing each other were part of their
community lives. Schwarz (2010) observed, ‘In CKPKH, the actors who play Jashoda hack
and cough until one imagines real blood being drawn from their lungs. They, too, drool and
expel phlegm, tears in their eyes from physical exertion. This is beyond realism, and the
physicality is transmitted to the audience with great effectiveness’ (p. 121). He compares
Budhan Theatre’s catharsis with the community people’s ‘intense oppression and physical
pain endured by criminal tribes’ and conforms ‘the realistic representation of suffering,
however painful’ (Schwarz, 2010, p. 121).
Without economy, space, props, stylized costumes and setting theatre can exist. That’s what
the play CKPKH did. Due to social, political and economic conditions theatre practitioners
did many experiments with the theatre art. Roughness is always at the centre of
experimentation. Brook (1968) called it The Rough Theatre which included salt, sweat, noise
and smell such as theatre on wagons, trestles, audience standing, drinking, sitting round the
table, upstairs, barns, in the bus, in the train, on the bus stand, in the book shop (p. 73).
CKPKH was also performed in the rough theatre form as it was performed in the library,
book shops and in community spaces which were not designed like conventional stages.
Rough theatre is born from necessity and experimentation to provide something different for
the spectators. Brook (1968) believed that ‘The Rough Theatre is close to the people: it may
be a puppet theatre, it may – as in Greek villages to this day – be a shadow show: it is usually
distinguished by the absence of what is called style as style is leisure’ (p. 74). However, Alok
did stylize theatre which he learnt at National School of Drama but he preferred to make the
play in The Rough Theatre form. In 2008, the play was invited to perform in the Krishna
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Kriti Festival of Arts and Culture in one of the metropolitan cities of India called Chennai.
The class of the audience was elite, the performance space was conventional and the form of
the play was rough. The play was highly criticized by the media for aspects such as its
amateurish portrayal and performance by the group and the message of the play left the
audience dumbfounded (Sureshkumar, 2008). He also mentioned that invitees who came with
their family members walked out in the middle of the play. It seems they were discomforted
to watch the Bhibatsa rasa which was the main rasa of the play and included vulgar gestures
of forced sex and abuse words which were part of the performers’ society and their life. It
was ironic that the roughness of the play was liked by the potentially oppressed and
oppressors, but was disliked by those who may not encounter such a situation. After
performing more than 300 shows of previous street plays such as Budhan, Pinya Hari Kale ki
Maut and Encounter, Budhan Theatre’s community actors were struggling between trained
and non-trained actors.
5.5 Kahani Meri Tumhari (KMT) (Story Mine and your’s) – Performing
Self
Budhan Theatre’s latest production titled Kahani, Meri-Tumhari (KMT) (Story, Mine-yours)
is based on the auto-biographical accounts of the Budhan Theatre’s senior actors. To practice
community theatre for the youth of the so-called criminal tribe was not so easy. Actors, who
were seeking social and political acceptance of the community from the state and mainstream
society, suffered a lot in their personal lives. Alok and Roxy’s acting in the play Budhan,
resulted in the police’s brutal torture of his father which was one of the causes of his death;
Roxy struggled to manage money to meet his father’s medical expenses and the logistics to
maintain the family at an early age; Kalpana faced social discrimination by community
people as the only senior actress in the theatre group of mainly boys and struggled to
reconcile family responsibility and commitment to practice theatre for change; Ankur, who
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began theatre when he was a child and was living in extreme poverty faced economic and
emotional struggle as a result of the loss of his close relatives and who simultaneously
sustained his commitment to community theatre for a long time; Sandeep faced three months
jail in an assault case due to his involvement in community theatre. Due to my anti-police
plays, I was jailed for 15 days and then exiled for three months from my police constituency
by involving me in a false case. There were hundreds of life stories of economic, social,
personal and emotional struggle to keep going with theatre in the community. Many
emotional moments and expressions were concealed in the lives of actors which they never
expressed, as they were performing the catharsis of DNT victims of social, legal and political
system. KMT is fully based on their struggle to sustain theatre to educate their spectators to
remove their prejudices about particular sections of society. As a process of making this
play, first, they write their auto-biographical account and then they transform their words into
creative expression. Freire (2005) explained the role of words in the transformative process,
based on his conversation with Prof. Ernani Maria Fiori. He states ‘Within the word we find
two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed—
even in part—the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time
praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world’ (p. 87). KMT has true words, a
true action which was a reflection of the stigmatised lives of Budhan Theatre members and
there was simultaneous emotional praxis by actors and spectators. Those words which turn
into dialogues in the performance area were true because those words were of the self. The
performance did not aim to make others suffer but to express personal suffering to transform
the spectators by producing a catharsis of real life suffering. Social, legal and political
systems always produce hatred for and discrimination against, the Chhara community but
even so the Chhara youth had faith that they could transform their spectators.
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Fortunately, during my research trip in India in April 2011, I was part of the rehearsal process
of this production and we decided the central theme of the play which was lying in the five
actor’s autobiographies and it was collective commitment of actors to prolong community
theatre by ignoring their day to day social, economical and political suffering. When they
perform the opening show in the theatre festival called Tamasha6, their words of personal
suffering turn into tears of actors and spectators because their performance has truth and it
turns into an emotional praxis that was enough to transform both. Grotowski (1968) explored
the ways in which art is important for human beings because ‘to cross our frontiers, exceed
our limitations, fill our emptiness – fulfil ourselves’ (p. 21). He further says that it is not a
state, but a process in which what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent. And it’s an own
truth to unwrap the life-mask, the theatre, with its full-fleshed perceptivity – something that
has always seemed a place of aggravation (Grotowski, 1968, p. 21). The Chhara actors own
truths unwrapped their life-mask to aggravate their spectators. Secondly, this play was
beyond theatrical doubleness. Mcconachie (2006) elaborates the idea of theatrical doubleness
and explains that it simply means the capability of spectators to understand that performance
exists at the same time in both actual and fictitious time and space; actors are real people on a
stage in the present and they are also the characters they represent in a make-believe time and
space (p. 10). In the case of KMT, the Chhara actors were beyond theatrical doubleness as
there was no fictitiousness in their performance. The actors and the characters were real, the
same person, representing their real life events not to make-believe but to get spectators in
their real life time and space where they struggled to sustain theatre for social change, despite
lots of hurdles. Malekar (2009) conformed theatrical non-doubleness of Budhan Theatre
productions, ‘The plays performed by Budhan Theatre are neither conventional nor
Media note: Ahmedabad’s untold tales take centre stage by DNA correspondent, DNA newspaper,
Available from: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_ahmedabads-untold-tales-take-centrestage_1537800
6
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experimental as you would know them. They have unique themes that are based on the
personal experiences of the actors and have unfailingly touched a chord with audiences’.
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Chapter 6 - Impact: Internal and External
By 2008, Budhan Theatre travelled extensively in cities and villages, and performed in a
range of spaces: conventional stages, conference rooms, under trees, in the open ground,
forests, cultural gatherings of DNTs and tribal book shops, in tea shops, college and school
campuses, on foot paths, in the Bastis (Ghettos), in front of government offices at road sides,
in the shops, in the DNT localities, on terraces, in libraries, museums, government institutes,
training institutes and more importantly in community spaces like dusty 12by12 feet space or
in the yards of community people. The community actors were not trained by expert
dramatists but they learned to use any available space for their cultural action and expression.
Interestingly, despite the fact that most of the actors’ parents were engaged in petty illegal
activities to feed the family, none of the actors tried to adopt an illegal occupation since they
had been engaged in theatre. In fact, they were expecting that theatre would help them to find
respectable jobs so that they could live a peaceful life. There is a hope for a day when they
will also live a life like other common men. Devy (2006) noted his first struggle to get into
Chharanagar. In 1998, he had asked his friend who was a painter, named Chakradhar to
obtain some basic information about the community from Chharanagar. Chakradhar could
not find any of his friends who could accompany him to Chharanagar. Finally, Devy
requested his former student and Ahmedabad Session Court judge Ms. Sonia Gokani to help
to get into Chharanagar. She herself could not make it as many of the Chharas’ cases were
going on in her court but she managed to call a police commissioner of Ahmedabad city for
the same work. The police commissioner ordered the local police to accompany Devy (p. 27).
One can imagine the kind of stigma attached to the community that people feared to come
across the community or to enter into their locality. After 10 years, by 2008, not only from
the city or state or across the nation, even the international community such as scholars,
researchers, film makers, photographers, writers, journalists, dramatists, educationalists,
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government officials like police, district collector, police commissioner, judges, policy
makers became frequent visitors to the Chhara community to study their problems and to
understand the creative intervention of Budhan Theatre. This development was unimaginable
to the community people. Budhan Theatre was breaking the colonial thought of bonding
criminality to keep certain sections aloof as bonded labourers in the fenced settlements and
distancing them from the rest of Indian society. The words about the Budhan Theatre’s
creative intervention was spreading rapidly in all directions and people were coming closer to
the community where, once, the children were forced to sit on the last bench in the classroom
of the school because they belonged to the Chhara community.
Budhan Theatre has been developing institutional relationships. The sole idea here, is to
educate people about the DNT communities, and particularly future decision makers. In this
way, Budhan Theatre has been working to make a community of DNT sympathisers who
could speak on behalf of DNTs who are speechless due to fear of the political system and
society. For example, in the last few years, the Indian Institute of Management,
Ahmedanada’s (IIMA) students visited Budhan Theatre and tried to understand the denotified Tribes’ plight. Mainstream students had a dialogue with the community people about
their social, economic and political issues, made films and wrote their academic work. Then,
the Budhan Theatre team was invited by IIMA to perform French writer Jean Genet’s La
Balcon (The Balcony) and street play Please, don’t beat me Sir. Our spectators were
management students and many high profile civil servants of the Indian government. Both
performances were followed by discussion and we appealed to them not to treat us as second
class citizens. By their regular visits some students and professors got interested in
community theatre and as result, last year, IIMA began a formal theatre course called Theatre
of the oppressed in association with the Budhan Theatre. This resulted in a participatory
theatre between the Chhara community people and the students and professors of the
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institute. Freire (1972) asserted that ‘Authentic education is not carried on by A for B or by A
about B, but rather A with B, mediated by the world - a world which impresses and
challenges both parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it’ (p. 66). The course was
designed for education program A with B. In the media report, the co-ordinator of the course
said ‘Budhan theatre is not a traditional medium where actors played different roles. It is a
powerful form of political and development theatre where enactors are part of social change.
It is a form that involves more group processes’ (Dave, 2011). BT developed relationships
with many other institutes such as Mudra Institute of Communication Academy (MICA),
National School of Design (NID), Dhirubhai Institute of Information and Communication
Technology (DA-IICT), Kadvibai Virani Kanya Vidhyalaya (KVKV), National Tribal
Academy and many more. Budhan Theatre was trying to develop a new sociology where
community people and rest of the world come together and try to be more human for each
other.
As mentioned above, press coverage has been motivational to us. When something is written
in the media we think that at least Budhan Theatre’s creative intervention to remove the
criminal stigma is widely covered by the local and national media and that is one of the
strongest positive outputs of theatre activity in the Chharanagar. There is no doubt that media
can have an important role in changing or creating a prejudicial perception about particular
groups of people. In this regard, Budhan Theatre is hugely successful in attracting the local
and national media by its theatrical intervention for change. The words in media coverage are
such as ‘This is where the Budhan Theatre Group has made a difference. It is dedicated to
breaking this destructive cycle, by moulding self-esteem and encouraging ambition’ (Faleiro,
2005); ‘Chharnagar now has the revised identity of an ‘actors colony’ (Rebello, 2008); ‘they
were not “born criminals but were instead born actors’ (Katakam, 2008); ‘Their quality of
facial expression, speech and gesture is unmatched. Because acting is inborn, a tradition
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dating back several centuries’ (Malekar, 2009). Before 1998, the community always appeared
in the media in negative terms. Budhan Theatre’s creative intervention is slowly transforming
this to publicise this marginalised and isolated community with respect. In contrast, it doesn’t
mean that every media supports the DNT cause. Renowned cultural activist and folklorist of
state of Gujarat named Jorawarsingh Jadav wrote an article, a half page story of A3 size
paper titled ‘The community of thieves has 36 arts of stealing’ in one of the leading
newspapers of the state called Gujarat Samachar. The article appeared on 27th of March
2011. One week earlier I went from England to India for my dissertation research on the
Chhara community. The writer created a fictional character called Chhaniyo and he portrayed
the Chhara tribe as Born Criminals through this character. He asked his fictional character;
‘From where did you learn stealing?’ His character replies, ‘we don’t have to learn it sir, it is
in our blood and by birth we are expert in 36 types of stealing art’ and then he explained 36
arts of stealing and he clearly mentioned that the Chhara tribe is an expert in these all arts
(Jadav, 2011, p. 10 -11). Even after 64 years of independence, a nineteenth century colonial
imagination including that which defined the thugee cult and criminal tribes is still prevailing
in the mind-set of the society and the state. It seems that these groups are still kept away from
the guarantees of rights in the Constitution of India which assures to its citizens that it will
provide ‘Equality of status and dignity’ (Government of India, 1949). Whenever this kind of
story appeared in the media, instead of feeling demoralized, we felt energized to use theatre
as a medium to sensitize and transform these kinds of people. We made an effort and we
invited the writer of the article to watch the play KMT on 28th of April 2011 but he did not
come. We will keep trying to get him to watch any of our performances. He is a human being
and there is a possibility that after watching the suffering of the community people, he may
be transformed and be more human.
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Budhan Theatre run a community library which was founded by Mahasveta Devi where 4000
books are collected by performing plays (instead of money, we took books for the library),
donations. We were running the library in a 10 by10 foot room for around 10 years and now
we have moved into a bigger space where community children and youth read the books and
rehearse plays. From an informal group, Budhan Theatre has now turned into an institute
named Diploma in Theatre Arts, Journalism and Media Studies (DTAJMS) with the help of
our parent organization Bhasha Research and Publication Centre. The institute aims to
provide essential theoretical and practical professional training to work in the communities
and develop creative leadership among marginalized communities who can use theatre, film
making and journalism for the social and political development and justice for their
respective communities. This year, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has
recognised DTAJMS’s certificate and diploma courses (Agency, 2011).
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Chapter 7 - Conclusion
When I came to the University of Leeds, the first thing I learned that was theatre cannot
change the world but certainly, theatre has power to change. This learning changed my
earlier perspective to see theatre. I think theatre is an event, a process, a challenge, and an
attempt to bring out a change whether it is social, political, economic or personal. No matter
whether it is commercial or experimental theatre or proscenium or any other theatre form,
this holds true. Psychologically, it is a soul searching process for actors and spectators.
Bharuch (1992) rightly says, ‘If theatre changes the world, nothing could be better, but let us
also admit that this has not happened so far. It would be wiser (and less euphoric) if we
accepted that it is possible to change our own lives through theatre’ (Bharuch, 1993, p. 10).
(In theatre, to analyse social and political change is a complex process but to analyse lives of
personal change can be less complex. We can see the evolution of transformation/liberation
processes in three ways; liberating actors, spaces and spectators.
To analyse actor’s liberation is simplest. Budhan Theatre actors were performing just for the
commitment to social change but they were not aware of how social change would come
through theatre. They were illiterate in that but they were enjoying performing their suffering.
This was the first time they had a platform to express their pain and they found people began
to listen them. Their suffering had words, their words had expression and their expression had
a space where they were seen by the people. When they were confronting the audience for
their acceptance, simultaneously they were also confronting the self as a way of initiating a
process of change within themselves. It’s difficult to say how theatre helped them to bring
about change within themselves but it is true that while practising theatre they kept away
from all illegal activities prevailing in the community, such as brewing illicit liquor,
consuming alcohol, and stealing. Despite the community’s negative response, they are raising
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their voices against internal issues of the community like child marriage, disbeliefs,
community council’s exploitations, domestic violence etc. I think, theatre empowered them to
bring out difference in the community and also within themselves. It’s really surprising that
whoever engaged in the theatre activity in the community never engaged in criminal
activities, despite lots of social and economic problems. I think, here, if we look at the
liberation process closely, we find that theatre fulfilled their inner emptiness and through
theatre they ripped out of the colonial mask of historically imposed criminality and they
found themselves as nineteenth century’s nomad entertainers who had only their bodies and
voice to entertain the people on the streets, jungles, mountains and villages in India. Theatre
revived their traditional cultural art which, instead of being a livelihood, became a social and
cultural movement of DNTs for the social and political opportunity to live life with dignity.
Secondly, theatre is also liberating space. The place where the Chharas lived was an infamous
place for its stigma as a hub of criminal activity but theatrical experiments bring the people
from various classes and various places to visit infamous, isolated and unnoticed place. I
discussed in the essay that people did not want to come to the Chharanagar but now people
from around the world are visiting this place, learning from the community actors and
teaching by donating books and sharing their experiences with the community people. Police
atrocities also reduced and they became members of the community library, occasionally
visiting for discussions and engaging in activities. Many of the community spaces like liquor
and gambling dens were transformed into theatre activity spaces and now people from
schools, colleges, institutes and nearby communities go there to watch the plays.
Thirdly, through performances, Budhan Theatre created huge awareness about the DNT
communities and their problems across the country. I must say that Budhan Theatre
succeeded in its effort to form a parallel force of people who can speak for the Chhara
community and other DNT communities if any injustice takes place. These people are social
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activists, media people, journalists, film makers, writers, poets, scholars, actors, dramatists,
civil society and of course to some extent, common men and women. In the case of Budhan
Theatre, they are gathering important people within the democratic political system and to
perform real life suffering is becoming a social movement of DNTs which can, later, turn into
a revolution for the constitutional rights of DNTs. Budhan Theatre is very much clear about
its aims to bring cultural revolution for DNTs. Due to fear and barbarian treatment from the
state and society, this section is so segregated and living in a dark age that it’s really a
challenging job to bring them together. There is only one hope to bring them together and
that is traditional art. By developing creative leadership in the marginalized communities
through Budhan Institute, we can bring huge cultural gatherings of de-notified communities
where they could gather to perform their historical anguish through traditional arts such as
dance, theatre, song, and acrobatics. That cultural gathering will provide their political voice
for their human rights in the largest democracy of the world. Budhan Theatre’s parent
organization Bhasha already organized cultural gathering every year called Mela of the DNT
people and in coming years this gathering must be enough huge to represent political voice of
DNTs for their constitutional guarantees of ‘Equality of status and dignity’ (Government of
India, 1949).
Budhan Theatre is committed to develop leaderships for the Cultural Revolution of denotified tribes.
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