It was 11 am in Bihar’s Belchi village when a group of 60-70 people, under the leadership of Mahavir Mahato, a landlord from the Kurmi caste, surrounded the houses of the Dalits and other backward castes. Eleven Dalits were tied, shot and burnt, and their properties destroyed; the perpetrators reportedly had a feast near the flames as the victims perished. The incident made nationwide headlines, and also marked the return of Indira Gandhi to active politics after the self-imposed six-month exile following the crushing defeat of the Congress in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections.
Nearly five decades later, a play, Mahabhoj, recalled the incident through a recent performance in Delhi’s LTG Auditorium.
Director Vipin Kumar, a NSD passout, spoke about the reasons for staging it now: “From epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata to today, caste has been mentioned and it hasn’t gone away. As always, marginalised groups are on the receiving end of caste oppression. Just today, I read about marginalised castes being attacked in Uttar Pradesh. So, from the time of Belchi to the present day, what has changed? The question of power in India is connected to the question of caste, and people flex it every time they need to.”
A modern-day adaptation
Mahabhoj has been adapted from Hindi writer’s eponymous Mannu Bhandari’s novel. Although in the original, there is no direct mention of the Belchi incident, Kumar believes that the caste crime inspired the novel. “The play follows Bishu, a local Dalit activist who stands up against a caste-based atrocity in a fictional village called Saroha,” says the director. “As his efforts to unravel things grow strong, the chief minister of the state gets him killed with the help of his right-hand man and a landlord. His death leads to multiple consequences. Binda, Bishu’s friend, stands up against the politician-landlord nexus. Mahesh, a PHD student from Delhi, who has come to Saroha to write a thesis also gets involved. The CM, however, manages to buy off the media, project a clean image of himself, and puts Binda behind bars.”
As a modern-day adaptation, the play made some technical changes. “When it was written, there was no concept of mobile phones or laptops. But today, if we want to present it to an urban audience, we have to make it realistic. Hence, the characters communicate through mobile phones. The PHD scholar is shown using a laptop,” notes Kumar.
Theatre inspirations
Born in Amritsar, Kumar was attracted to theatre since his college days. After six years of working actively in theatre, he joined the National School of Drama in New Delhi in 2012. He is influenced by realism, the acting method of Konstantin Stanislavski and works of Michael Chekhov. “Realism helps to portray the things that I want to showcase. The text is written in a realistic way, and it deals with real-life problems. On the one hand, there were characters from the village who spoke in a certain way. We had to ensure that. On the other, Mahesh, who comes from the city, had his own way of understanding things. We also had show that,” he says in conclusion.