Every alternate Saturday morning, children living in the slums of Nithari, in Noida, wake up in a state of frenzied excitement. They rush to their school, an NGO called Saksham, and wait patiently for its doors to open. While a curious bystander might attribute the children’s extraordinary zeal to a large coffer of ice-cream behind the school’s closed door, the truth is more surprising. The children are in eager anticipation of “Sanjay Bhaiya”, who, along with the rest of his theatre troupe, has been conducting three-hour informative, entertaining and thought-provoking workshops for the children within the school premises.
The Delhi-based theatre troupe, which calls itself ‘Pandies’ - after a derogatory term devised by the British to refer to the Indian insurgent Mangal Pandey – is, as its name suggests, not your ordinary theatre troupe. Pandies prides itself on being the first and only feminist- activist theatre group in the country that is, says its founder Sanjay Kumar, “committed to staging plays relevant to our ethos and time.” Speaking about the troupe’s origins and ideals, he adds, “Pandies’ theatre is from the margins and is a theatre of children, women, slum-dwellers, the homeless, and of vulnerable sections and subsections within those margins. We are feminist and proud of being so. The issues that we choose revolve around women because the group believes if our society is to head anywhere, it has to become more women-oriented and woman-friendly.”
On this particular Saturday, Pandies members are performing short skits specially prepared for the children. One of the skits, though complex, is particularly riveting. It describes the story of a young, pregnant woman who is convinced by her lover to leave their village for Delhi in order to, ostensibly, escape parental wrath and marry. After reaching Delhi, however, the man takes the woman to a park behind Jawaharlal Nehru University, rapes and subsequently throttles her. Fortuitously, the woman survives and is cared for by residents of a slum nearby, where she delivers her baby. Uneducated and without any vocational training, she and her son are forced into a life of destitution and poverty.
Despite the sensitive nature of the multi-dimensional plot, Sanjay and his troupe mince no words when discussing it with the children. “Do you think the man loves the woman?” he asks. “What do you think of love?” “Do you think the woman should have left her village?” And, most astonishingly to all of us present: “Did you know that this was based on a true story?”
Each question is followed by a thoughtful silence, after which both girls and boys venture replies. “I don’t think the man loved the woman. I think he just wanted to use her for fun, which is not right,” says Azharuddin, whose father is a tailor in a garment factory. 15 year old Soni, whose parents run a roadside tea stall, raises her hand shyly, but speaks confidently and with emotion. “The woman shouldn’t have left without informing her parents or discussing it with anyone. This is the reason why education is so important, especially for girls. If she was educated, she would have been able to make a more informed decision, and at least would have been able to support herself.”
“These workshops are a window into a different world for these children,” says Nadira Razak, co-founder of Saksham. “Simply encouraging them to think and giving them the opportunity to express themselves contributes tremendously to their personality and self-esteem. These children are normally never asked their opinions on serious issues; giving them this platform has inspired positive attitudinal shifts,” she says. Indeed, within the short span of two months, she says, the impact is already evident in the children’s increased confidence; they eagerly look forward to their first on-stage performance later this year.
Begun as a small university movement in Delhi in 1987, Pandies has since grown into a robust troupe with over 70 members, many of whom are college students interested in social change through theatre. Isha, a recent graduate of Hansraj College, has been an ardent member of the troupe for two years – and doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. “Pandies gives us a space of freedom where we don’t have to worry about what we’re saying,” she says. “Not only do we get to voice our opinions, we actually do something about them as well. And because we all volunteer our time and skills, it is truly an activist forum.” The troupe has one or two major performances each year and in the interim, they perform at slums, schools, and colleges. They choose a topic and work on it over the course of a year; since its founding, Pandies has tackled issues such as rape, prostitution, HIV, the Mental Health Act and its relation to women, and the institutions of love and marriage.
In addition to their work in Delhi, Pandies has conducted workshops and performed in theatre festivals both nationally and internationally. In 2005, a year in which they had adopted the theme of “Anti-Communalism”, the troupe conducted a seven-day workshop in Gulmarg, Kashmir involving fifty-five children – Kashmiri Pundit and Kashmiri Muslim girls and boys - between ten and sixteen years of age. Says Sanjay, “It was a daunting challenge to put together a production in 7 days with children from these two volatile communities; in addition to their different religious backgrounds, many of the children were poor, some were orphaned, and most were traumatized by the violence they had witnessed. However, our methodology of individual and collective exercises, short story writing, creating twenty minute skits, and the final 90 minute production turned out to be extremely successful.”
At the moment, the troupe is rehearsing for their next performance at the Sri Ram Centre in Delhi, a montage of 3 individual pieces, each critiquing modern-day constructions of masculinity and the state from the perspective of a female protagonist. With elements from real-life stories and absorbing themes, the mid-August performance is not to be missed. For more information about Pandies, contact Sanjay at pandies@netscape.net
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