The hand that rocks the cradle…

Who has more right over the land — the owner who possesses the deed or the tiller who makes it fertile with his sweat and toil? The question has confounded answer-seekers for centuries.Raising this very issue, Ajoka Theatre recently performed the play Chaak Chakkar at the Alhamra Arts Complex in Lahore with assistance from the Lahore Arts Council.

Chaak Chakkar delved into the question of owner-versus-keeper in a thought-provoking, humorous manner. Adapted by Shahid Nadeem from the famous German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle written in 1944, the play was typical of Ajoka’s adaptation-based performances.Taking its cue from the Pakistani context of the downtrodden masses, exploitative elite and a weak judiciary, the original play (that had been taken by Brecht from a 14th century Chinese legend) provided Ajoka the perfect story for our times.

The story of Chaak Chakkar revolves around a corrupt subedar who rules his sultanate ineffectively. He and his wife, the subedarni, are only concerned about their wealth, gardens, protocol and their infant son who is the heir to the throne.Ultimately, palace intrigues led by the subedar’s rotund, corrupt brother result in a bloody coup which sees the subedar’s decapitated head hanging at the city’s gates. The subedarni flees the palace and amid all the panic and anxiety to take her 19 trunks of clothes, jewellery and silver, leaves her infant son behind!

A peasant girl, Raano, working for the subedarni finds herself in an awkward situation as she has to decide to save the wailing infant from the clutches of the merciless soldiers thereby putting her own life at risk, or to run to a safer place and wait for her fiancé (played by Nirvaan Nadeem); the handsome soldier who is to return from war and marry her.Raano chooses the more perilous option of the two, putting her own life and future in jeopardy. What ensues is a captivating cat-and-mouse game as she escapes several times from the soldiers looking for her, disregarding her own comfort in feeding and caring for the child. She braves extremely difficult circumstances and in order to save the baby boy, proclaims him as her own, not caring for the disgrace it brings to her name. Hania Cheema did a commendable job in playing Raano and was applauded generously each time she managed to escape the murderous soldiers.

Meanwhile, the boy grows up, the war ends and her fiancé returns but finds everything changed. The subedarni is back too to claim her child. The scene changes to the rogue-turned-comedian who is installed as the new judge for the sultanate in a strange twist of events. That the judge is deposed, beaten into a pulp and then reinstated was another jibe at judicial happenings in the country. Acted brilliantly by Usman Zia, the judge had the audience in stitches with his crisp timing and expressions. Witty comments such as “pehle munsif badmashi karte thay, ab badmash munsif bane ga” had everyone in the audience cracking up.The judge sits on the big book of constitution while giving arbitrary verdicts and settling two cases in one hearing. His suo-motu actions were hilarious and made him the last hope of the oppressed masses that still look up to him despite knowing he has his fair share of flaws.

Raano refuses to give up the child she has started loving as her own. The hot-tempered, ill-mannered subedarni moves the court and the new judge has to decide who gets the child. The case is riveting, funny and captivating till the verdict is announced.High on the entertainment factor, the musical play also featured a guest appearance by Uzra Butt who plays the grandmother called dadi maan, and moves the court for one of her disputes. The 92-year-old theatre veteran played the same role a quarter of a century ago when Ajoka had launched the play. She and her sister — veteran performer Zohra Sehgal who stayed in India after Partition — are two living legends of theatre in South Asia. Ajoka’s Madeeha Gauhar, while giving the credits, remembered how Uzra in her performance 25 years ago had gotten a fracture yet did not reveal it to anyone during the play’s two-hour performance and acted flawlessly.

Ajoka also brought in an almost entirely new cast for Chaak Chakkar. This was much-needed since of late, Ajoka plays have almost had the same cast playing the main roles. Despite brilliant acting performances, one wished there were new faces on stage. Madeeha also said that Ajoka needed financial assistance as the performance of the plays required funds, though a lot of volunteers have also been working for the theatre company.In times of the current socio-political dismay and the alarming state of insecurity throughout the country, it was notable that the performance did not get the packed audience in Lahore that Ajoka plays usually do. Needless to say, the initiative must be commended and supported. To quote Madeeha Gauhar here, “the show must go on.”

This article was published in Images, Dawn Newspaper on October 19th, 2008.

Ajoka Theatre's Hotel Mohenjodaro - a review

The events of 1947 and 1971 have traumatised many a writer such as Saadat Hasan Manto and Quratulain Hyder to produce masterpieces in Urdu that elicit introspection and catharsis. Today, these events need to be looked at rationally in order to understand our social psyche and to move on progressively.

Ajoka Theatre’s Indo-Pak Punj Pani Theatre festival held this month in Lahore aimed to showcase a collaborative set of performances by Indian and Pakistani artistes to give voice to their understanding of the events of both ’47 and ’71, respectively. Sadly, the theatre company had to alter its publicised set of performances with the Indian government’s last minute cancellation of ‘on foot visa’ for the team of Indian artistes who had to cross over to Pakistan via the Wagah Border. It seems that some things never change!

According to the Ajoka, initially it was the Pakistan government’s dilly dallying with the diplomatic procedures and with much ado finally gave in to Indian artistes coming over to perform politically charged plays with content that could make diplomacy on both sides wince with discomfort. However, the Indian government’s refusal to give security clearance to the performers proved to be the proverbial last nail in the coffin of dialogue through interaction.

So what was to be a collaborative performance called Yatra — 1947 on the first day was replaced by Ajoka’s Hotel Moenjodaro. The play is based on a short story called Dhanak by Ghulam Abbas, one of the great Urdu short story writers.


Adapted and directed by Shahid Nadeem, Hotel Moenjodaro is about radical mullahs who want to take over the reigns of government in an attempt to reform and set the affairs of the state ‘right’ — as per their own radical stance. What followed was Ajoka’s trademark unveiling of a plot full of satire, music and dance. The highly-charged trio of mullahs, headed by an Ameer, succeeds in its attempt to ‘cleanse’ the state of all that is obscene and sinful. In an obvious and comical reference to the Taliban regime’s mindset, and set against the backdrop of real-life footage of Taliban and the oppressive Gen Ziaul Haq era, the new government bans everything from wine to TV, and walkman to the sari! Once everything licentious is banned, all sinners are whipped, hanged and/or stoned to death, the state becomes a paragon of righteousness for them.Such is the state of affairs until the mullahs, who belong to different schools of thought, begin to differ with each other as to how shariah should be enforced. The differences get uglier and louder till opposing factions start killing off each other. The well-meaning Ameer who tries to unite everyone is eventually murdered for being suspected of his motives.

What follows is civil unrest, murder and plunder. The lights go off to the sound of enemy planes bombarding an already dead state. Much later, some tourists visit the site to be shown the ruins of a once prosperous civilization that was destroyed mysteriously.

As with all Ajoka plays, the content was highly relevant and controversial at the same time. A lady with a headscarf by my side was terribly annoyed with her clean-shaved husband who was enjoying the satire. Both were left silent in the end. I thought the play was sensitively handled given the topic’s explosive potential to ignite opposing mindsets in our society. The radical mullah mindset was portrayed and religion or religious people were not ridiculed. Hotel Mohenjodaro is surprisingly relevant given it was written in the ’60s when hardly anyone could have foreseen the events of a polarised society today.

On the second day of the festival, a performance of Saadat Hasan Manto’s acclaimed Toba Tek Singh was held. The play has been staged repeatedly in Pakistan and India, and according to Ajoka, is particularly appreciated by Indian audiences. It depicts the anguish and suffering of a deranged man, Toba Tek Singh, who is transported away from his homeland in 1947. Manto leaves it to the audience to figure out who is more deranged — Toba or the bunch of officers hurriedly deciding the fate of refugees.

The festival concluded on the third day with the performance of Shehr-i-Afsos, based on Intizar Hussain’s masterpiece. It is about three characters who relive the nightmarish events of ’47 and ’71 that have trapped them into a ceaseless state of guilt and condemnation. With the play Ajoka attempts to present a view of Partition that, sadly, many of us do not wish to either remember or learn from.

Published originally in Images, DawnNewspaper in June 2008

Ajoka Theatre's Toba Tek Singh - A review

Sixty years down the road, we as a nation are facing what seems to be a mid-life crisis. The formula of Pakistan’s creation that clicked so well for the first decade or so has now been reduced to a torrent of blame debates questioning its very existence.

Some intellectuals are even of the opinion that the whole Partition business was a huge folly that had and continues to have great repercussions on the lives of humanity on this side of the world.

Holding similar views, Ajoka Theatre recently staged an adaptation of Saadat Hassan Manto’s short stories, Toba Tek Singh, Siyah Haashiye and Khol do in a production titled Toba Tek Singh (TTS).

Staged at the Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore on August 17 and 18, the play was a depiction of the monumental human losses suffered by people on both sides of the Wagah Border during the birth of the two nations. Controversial as the Ajoka plays are, the adapted version of Toba Tek Singh too contained some debatable strains of thought.

According to Madiha Gauhar the play was staged to encourage soul-searching among the audience on the events of 1947. “We need to delve into the human tragedy of 1947 in order to put our house in order and move forward,” she said, adding, “for 60 years we have been fed with the ideology that the migration was voluntary on both sides of the border which is not true. The issues of religious extremism in our country can directly be attributed to the hurried and ill-planned Partition that robbed our country of its religious diversity and reduced a multi-cultural society into a monolithic one. The scars of Partition are still not going away, which is perhaps why it is important for us to think whether it was really needed.”

Set against the backdrop of a pathway lined with barbed wires, TTS shows the fate of lunatics in the Lahore Mental Hospital and how they are treated and transported to India on the basis of their religion. The mental asylum is actually a metaphor used by Manto to describe the insanity of the human losses suffered during Partition.

One particular lunatic, Bishan Singh (played very well by Sarfaraz Ansari), keeps asking whether Toba Tek Singh is in India or Pakistan, and hurls a volley of inanity at anyone who responds to him either seriously or in ridicule. The play is interspersed with screenings of actual stills and video footage of the migration carnage. Black-and-white images of mass cremations and graves, piles of naked dead bodies heaped along roadsides and a vast sea of humanity trekking on foot to its destination casts a grim shadow, driving home the point that the Partition was creation as well as destruction. The story of Sirajuddin’s search for his beautiful daughter, Sakina, in Lahore’s hospitals and refugee camps and her eventual appearance — brutally violated by Pakistani volunteers — was particularly poignant.

In the mental asylum, the inmates are treated like animals, thrown here and cooped there on their onward journey to India, depicting that those arbitrarily deciding their fate were bigger lunatics. Two officials from both the countries are shown filling files of refugee data while a mime of lunatic refugees being dragged violently in the background depicts the callous attitude of bureaucracy towards a highly emotional affair.

The play ends with Bishan Singh alias Toba Tek Singh refusing to cross over to India. The aged Toba stands in deaf and mute grief on no man’s land till one day he falls dead on his feet between the two borders; stateless in death.

While agreeing with the play’s thrust on the catastrophic human losses of Partition and the fact that they etched deep scars on the hearts of people on both sides for years and years, I thought Ms Gauhar’s argument was flawed — that the migration of millions of people was forced and that only those people left for the new countries of their choice voluntarily who had cushy jobs or guaranteed futures. If that had been the case, we might not have survived the past six decades under some of the most oppressive political and social circumstances.

Is it really wise to slur the noble intentions of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his league of men with integrity who gave us a blessing we haven’t really treasured?

Ajoka Theatre's Burqavaganza - a review

ln our increasingly polarised world, issues once unimportant have become a great source of discord among people, irrespective of religion and/or culture. The issue of hijab, burqa or purdah, for instance, is drawing huge debates from western and as well as eastern societies.

Set against the background of this sensitive issue, Ajoka Theatre recently held the premiere of its play called Burqavaganza at the Alhamra Cultural Complex in Lahore. According to the brochure, the play is an “outrageous musical extravaganza written to challenge the mindsets, provoke the audience to rethink and break the chains of prejudice and outdated values.”

What followed was a series of skits based on national and international news clippings regarding the veil. It presented a hypothetical society where every individual is draped in yards of burqa in true Taliban-style and every few scenes ended with a popular film song. It was an incisive take on the fixation with burqa and the double standards that go with it.

To begin with, a TV channel by the name of Burqa Vision flashed the history of the burqa from the Stone Age, where a prehistoric woman is covered in a veil of leaves, to modern times where she wears the shuttlecock version of the head-to-toe veil. A take on the Star Plus soaps was particularly hilarious as all characters including men wore the hijab and acted with exaggerated histrionics in a play called Kyunke Burqa Bhi Kabhi Hijab Tha. Another skit showed two religious scholars taking live telephone calls from all over Pakistan on issues regarding the veil and answering in convoluted terms, beyond the comprehension of the callers. Politicians were shown exploiting the agenda of the purdah to their advantage, and western societies being unyielding in terms of demanding a ban on the all-enveloping veil.

A cricket match played by veiled players sent the audience in stitches. Other skits made fun of the obsession of our security personnel to go into detailed frisking and body searches of females, an astronaut holding an American flag follows local militia running after a most wanted terrorist Bin Batin symbolising that while our nation is busy with superficial issues that hardly affect us, the western societies have advanced greatly in the fields of science and technology. A love struck couple in hijab is shown courting with the parents of the girl coming to see the prospective groom and end up taking his measurements because he is fully covered. They eventually get married and after several years of marriage are sentenced to stoning to death by a jirga for wearing a revealing hijab. Another skit showed politicians and people of national fame hiding behind burqas symbolising that each had their own hidden agendas to manipulate the masses.

The play was well-researched with a witty viewpoint on an issue that has of late become a focal point of discord. Though one could not agree with all the jibes at the sensitive issue, one definitely agreed that purdah is an individual’s own choice and any compulsion to wear or discard it would foment frustration. An exhibition outside the auditorium displayed various news clippings and photographs regarding the hijab to reinforce to the audience that some of the skits were based on authentic facts.

According to Shahid Nadeem, the writer of Burqavaganza, the objective was not to hurt anyone’s beliefs or feeling. “We wanted to prompt a different thought process … one that can change the system through self-criticism. We should be able to see for ourselves where we are in the world with respect to real issues like survival, justice, freedom, human rights, quality of life and not be fixated with base issues like how much we should or should not be covered,” he said.