In India a dowry death in Delhi gave birth to feminist street theatre!

In Delhi of the late 1970s, dowry deaths were so commonplace that newspapers relegated them to city briefs. But Hardeep Kaur’s murder in October 1978 in Jangpura, a middleclass colony, was so brazen that it refused to be shrunk into three lines in a single column: her death screams were heard by a neighbour, as she burnt in the sitting room of her home.

Kaur’s story became the core of one of India’s first feminist street plays, Om Swaha, staged in late 1979. It was a powerful work which women’s groups used to rouse public outrage against dowry killings, setting in motion events that ended in a landmark anti-dowry legislation in 1980.

The story of Om Swaha and other feminist street plays of the early ’80s and their evolution over the next decade is being told by scholar Deepti Priya Mehrotra in her upcoming book, Feminist Street Theatre, Histories and Stories. Mehrotra herself was a part of some of these pioneering plays.

“There is so little known today of the feminist street theatre movement of the time,” said Mehrotra. “These were intense works based on shared experiences of women, a part of feminist activism itself, and a powerful mode of communicating gender concerns to large sections of people. They played out in streets, homes, courtyards, colleges, at protests, reaching out to as many as possible.”

Mehrotra read from these plays recently with actors of Jana Natya Manch at Studio Safdar in Delhi.

She and other early feminists point out that plays like Om Swaha, Aurat, Ahsaas, Mulgi Zhali Ho and Aurat aur Dharam were born of the activism of the time but gave a bigger voice to the women’s movement. These were entertaining works, full of humour, folk music and colour even if the stories they told were grim. At least two of them, besides Om Swaha, were first staged in 1979. Safdar Hashmi’s Janam Aurat went to become hugely successful and ran to full houses for 20 years. Meanwhile, Ahsaas, a street play with vignettes from an average woman’s life, was also enacted in middleclass homes in Lajpat Nagar, taking theatre into the homes of the play’s characters.

This feminist street theatre was Hindi and beyond, says Mehrotra. “There was Jyoti Mhapsekar and Stree Mukti Sangathana’s phenomenally popular Mulgi Zhali Ho and various other street plays in the making in other parts of India, especially Chhattisgarh and Karnataka,” she said.

Source: Scroll