BENGALURU: With his last play The Djinns of Eidgah, playwright Abhishek Majumdar explored the human cost of the Kashmir conflict. Now, with his latest play Pah-Lak, Majumdar offers a philosophical view into the nature of non-violence and its effectiveness in countering oppression in contemporary times. Having premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 2019, the play, which received mixed to positive reviews, is coming to Bengaluru for the first time this weekend. The two-hour play will be staged in Tibetan with English subtitles projected above the stage.
Set against the backdrop of the 2008 Lhasa protests, Pah-Lak, meaning ‘father’, follows a young woman whose final act of resistance against oppression from the Chinese government sparks a wave of violence. Inspired by real events, Majumdar was compelled to create the fictional tale to understand why non-violence movements seemingly never tend to garner any reaction until violence crops up.
“While working on my previous plays, I started thinking about the role of non-violence in today’s freedom movements. It seemed to be that all these movements, despite being different from each other, had a common element – violence. Of course, these movements themselves might not be violent, but there are sections which use violence as the primary tool,” he shares, adding, “That, to me, seemed counter-intuitive because, non-violence movements, despite their many challenges, had established that it’s possible to create change without resorting to violence. For instance, in the mid-20th century, across the world, a lot of countries achieved independence through non-violence. But just a few decades later, movements in Kashmir and Palestine, had turned violent. It basically gave the impression that if you’re not violent, you will not be heard.”
Of all the resistance movements currently ongoing across the world, what prompted Majumdar to pick the Tibetan movement? “I decided to study the Tibetan resistance because I was intrigued by Buddhism and its role in the Tibetan resistance and also because I had a lot of individual connections with people involved in the movement, people who I knew from my university days in Delhi and from Bengaluru,” he shares. “Karnataka has one of the largest populations of Tibetans in exile. So my research started with Bengaluru, with extensive interviews of Tibetans in exile. It then took me to Dharamshala, Hong Kong, Beijing and finally to Lhasa.”
Weaving a fictional tale set against a historical background was a difficult task in itself. But with Pah-Lak, Majumdar set himself a high bar by opting to develop the play using Buddhist dramatisation. “The play doesn’t follow western concepts of dramatisation – the kind we are accustomed to seeing in modern television or cinema. It doesn’t have an Aristotelian structure, where there’s usually a problem, and a protagonist will go on a journey to solve that problem, arriving at a conclusion.
This kind of dramatisation usually has a few assumptions, in relation to how a protagonist is going to act. But Buddhist dramatisation is unlike western dramatisation. There, the goal is renouncement. I believe that renunciation is at the heart of the Tibetan conflict with the Chinese government. So that became the heart of Pah-Lak, it explores how each of us understands the purpose of life differently and how a communist’s view on the purpose of life differs from that of a Buddhist monk. It’s not necessarily about good or evil,” he concludes.