When slaves speak
HYDERABAD: Slavery. It can be traced back to Code of Hammurabi of Mesopotamia, the first known civilization, which records the same as the common practice. Many peoples in the due course of time abolished it, while in some nations slaves are still bought and sold in secretive marts. That’s how when in 1981, investigative journalist of ‘The Indian Express’ Ashwini Sarin, to expose the heinous practice, bought a slave woman Kamla in Dholpur Market, questions were raised not just about the practice, but journalistic ethics as well. He brought the woman in his Delhi house who innocently asked his wife ‘as to how much
Ashwini bought her for’! Celebrated author Vijay Tendulkar wrote his famous play Kamla on the same incident denuding several other layers of slavery within the topographies of society and psyche. Recently, city-based theatre group KissaGo performed the play at Lamakaan to a packed audience.The play opened with actor and play director Subhash Gupta talking to his journalist nephew Jaising’s wife’s Sarita, played by Shailja Chaturvedi. They both wait for his return from his assignment in some remote village.
He does return, but with his purchase Kamla from slave-market whose timid personality disappears in the big Delhi house, but at the same time her very presence and existence is what gives the story-line its weight. Jaising is a hero-journalist who dares expose social evils by risking his life as the landline phone keeps ringing with unknown threat calls. Sarita thinks that he’s giving the poor rescued woman shelter in his house, but he actually presents her as his prized trophy at the press conference.
The fellow reporters ask Kamla lewd questions related to flesh trade. Hearing this through his friend Jain woman pride of the submissive wife Sarita is hurt which she vents out in some acerbic words that don’t sit well with Jaising. The climax of the play reaches when late at night Kamla sits with a gloomy Sarita who’d a tiff with her husband. She innocently tells the lady of the house that they both can share 15 nights each with ‘the husband’.
Then her pointed question comes as to how much Jaising paid to ‘buy’ her! The artiste Kajol Dubey perfectly fit in the role with her expressions that seemed very natural to her. She mistakes a journalist’s tactics for sensational news as her social protection. Exploring deeper, as a woman she compromises with the situation and prepares herself to be part of Jaising’s life and household ignoring the fact that he ‘bought her’. This lays bare the tragic lives of humans especially women sold at slave markets who end up in flesh trade as sex-slaves! At the same time she’s a paradoxical reflection of Sarita’s life toying in the hands of a chauvinist male who doesn’t practise ideas of the very freedom that he writes about or is known to stand up for. In fact, Jaising, too, has become a slave of fame that rests on the fragile scaffolding of rusted ideals. What rises in the guise of ‘exposing the truth’ is a compromise, the moth-eaten picture of a society that exists only in dreams and those supposedly bearing a torch to it make a bonfire of the ideals in plush boardrooms over fat salary cheques.
The play has several layers that dismantle one by one. For example, the uncle Kaka Sa, too, is a journalist but of regional language. He himself is a contrast to his nephew Jaising who works for English media which has limited reach only to coffee-sipping crowds and not to those whose stories are splashed on the front pages especially the downtrodden from rural areas of the country. Jay Jha is brilliant as a firebrand journalist and equally dominating husband. He opens up the character bit by bit to expose the compromises that his soul, that was clear once, has done with the worldly ideals. The play makes you stare long enough at the several slaves that we ourselves have become or are becoming.