Page 305

Speaking from the margins

DIWAN SINGH BAJELI

Delhiites saw two touching accounts of women in distress this past week.



Poignant The performances struck a chord with the audience.

The Hindi adaptation of two short stories by Rabindranath Tagore presented by Shaurya at Purva Sanskritik Kendra this past week brought to fore the plight of women in feudal India and their yearning for compassion. The directors tried to capture the pathos, anguish and irony inherent in the original stories.

The evening opened with the presentation of “Patni Ka Patr” which was directed and adapted by Navratan Gautam, displaying total fidelity to the original investing the production with poetic sensibility and rhythmic flow of dramatic action.
In first person

A young woman, Mrinal, is the protagonist who narrated her pathetic story in first person. The way she narrated her tale moved our hearts. The world she presented is one dominated by the male in which woman is a mere commodity. In this process, she was able to present many faces of tortured women that inhabit her world.

A solo act, Vidhi was cast in the role of Mrinal. Mrinal unburdened herself to her husband through a letter. She recalled with bitterness the behaviour of her arrogant and insensitive husband who had no feelings for his wife.

Only suffering and humiliations had been her lot. What shocked her the most was the brutal end of Bindu, the sister of the wife of her brother-in-law. This poor and orphan girl was forced to stay with her sister to escape from the slavery of her cousins.

Here in her sister’s house she was treated just like a servant and forced to marry a mentally unsound man. Unable to bear the savagery inflicted by the male members, she committed suicide.

Mrinal was very much attached to the unfortunate girl. Bindu’s tragic death had jolted her and she began her journey to find out a meaning in her life and in an act of defiance left her husband and wrote to him a letter.

Properties are placed at different places on the stage in an elegant style that create the right ambience of an upper class Bengali home. Director Gautam aptly uses male voices from the wings to convey the brutality of men against women to create dramatic intensity. The effect of flute added to the mood. Various theatrical expressive devices projected a social fabric in which women are denied basic human rights.

Vidhi as Mrinal gave a brilliant account of herself. The way she moved on the stage, delivered her lines, using a variety of pitches and tones conveyed the inner turmoil of her character. Towards the end she imparted serenity to her portrait when she discovered the spiritual meaning in her life as discovered by Meera, a woman tortured by heartless men, who attained sublime divinity.

This was followed by another short story, the “Postmaster” which was adapted and directed by H.S Harsh. The “Postmaster” is a highly significant work of art which vibrates with contemporary sensibility. The undercurrents of the story reveal the boredom caused by alienation, the insensitivity of urban men towards the dispossessed living in villages. There are strong elements of sympathy and irony.
A deviation

Harsh’s adaptation of the original appeared to be a deviation, to say the least. There are two main characters in the original – A young “Postmaster” from Kolkata posted in a remote village and Ratan, an illiterate and orphan village girl who volunteers herself as a domestic help to the postmaster.

Away from the metropolitan life he is lonely in this mosquito-infested village. In his loneliness he establishes a human contact with Ratan and starts teaching her. Once he falls sick Ratan looks after him as if she were his sister or a little mother. The girl becomes attached to him.

In Harsh’s adaptation Ratan was a young man who was shown as mentally retarded who becomes normal after being taught by the postmaster who resigned to offer Ratan his post.

Satyajit Ray’s cinematic version of the Postmaster not only highlighted “The loneliness of the human heart” but also with the slight change in the original Ray showed Ratan’s maturity who revealed her wounded pride in a restrained manner and turned away from the departing postmaster who tried to give her money.

In the original she takes her relationship with the postmaster seriously, “fell to the ground, clasped his feet and pleaded” to take her with him. The postmaster, a city-bred, rationalises his departure in these words, “life is full of partings, full of death…” In Harsh’s adaptation we missed this vital hiatus between the world-views of village and city people.