Injustice in theatrical action

Akshay Nagarajan’s Undertrials brings the Indian justice system under a lens with nuanced characters and narratives
Photos: Ashwin Prasath
Photos: Ashwin Prasath

CHENNAI: A circumstantial criminal, a revolutionist and an innocent man are all in prison together. Who gets justice? Well, no one. In the fictional world so vividly created by Akshay Nagarajan, there is little room for due process or a semblance of a functional system. When you realise that Akshay himself is a lawyer and his fiction finds its roots in the encounters of his day job, this version of the barroom joke takes a grim turn. And you’re left with the weight of your blissful ignorance, now shattered for good. Well, that’s precisely the point of the tragicomedy Akshay presents in collaboration with TheatreKaran, Undertrials.

Of everyday injustice
Akshay brings to stage the horrors of our justice system through specifically detailed stand-ins. The play opens with two inmates with considerable musical prowess. While one quietly plays the flute, the other accompanies him with a ganjira; a result of the prison’s ‘music therapy’, we learn. The prison guards left to guard them find ways to amuse themselves at the expense of these musicians. How? By taunting them with the threat of thrashing. Even as this scene is played for comic relief, and brilliantly so by the cast, it says more about life in prison, stripped of dignity and basic rights, than pages of dialogue and discourse could ever have.

Our guards are no cardboard cut-outs either. They consider themselves the victims of the system too — left at a dead-end job, with little power to effect any change, forced to do their ‘duty’ even as the idea of imprisonment as a means of rehabilitation is being crushed under their very boots. While you may not be inclined to empathise with their plight when the harrowing stories of thousands of prisoners (even the guilty ones) vie for your attention, it does make you pause. Makes you consider just how much you can blame the cops for everything.

In Akshay’s world — as in real life — no two prisoners are alike. Sapru, the self-proclaimed political activist, admits to having committed a crime to question the injustices of the system. Yet, he naively believes that the same system would give him a fair shot at a trial. His time in prison is full of political platitudes and poetic struggle. For the conventionally naive Prasad, who doesn’t even know why he was put in prison in the first place, blind desperation and despair fill the day. For the veteran undertrial Gobind, who has served 14 years even though the maximum punishment for his crime is four, the prison has become his home.

Of black, white and the grey
Now, these men are no saints. Gobind had no trouble making saarayam for a living; little did it matter to him that his boss would add ‘something’ to it. It just so happened that he had to take the blame for it. Caught in the cycle of poverty and the pressure to make money, there’s little love left over for his family. His wife would certainly agree, having had him ‘force himself’ on her one too many times. For all his intellectual leanings, Sapru is more delusional than a revolutionary. His belief in his ‘cause’ seems to have done little to make him go beyond mere demonstration. Prasad seems to have been passing through life relying on one person or the other; the latest to have taken the burden is the unrewarded wife and his lawyer, Sharada.

None of this makes you like the men you’re expected to empathise with. Yet, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? That justice systems go beyond human fallacies of personal prejudice and opinions and allow for the due course. You’re expected to empathise with the men for the rights they have lost, even if you may not want to sit down for a cup of tea with them.

How do you portray the shocking levels of lapses in the system — where arrests are made long before the investigation, basic procedures like FIR and chargesheet are given a miss, cops go beyond their brief and judges barely fulfil theirs? Akshay stages a play within a play. When the lawyer wife comes calling, the cops don’t offer the next step but act out the doomed possibilities of a court hearing that’ll never come.

At the end of the hour, you buy all this pain and prejudice presented to you because the cast make quite a case for the characters. The music, blended into the scene by flautist Suraj and percussionist Sarva, adds more to it than you’d expect. After four showings at Alliance Francaise, Undertrials has certainly left its mark on the audience. Speaking of the play, Akshay’s mentor and former judge of the Supreme Court, Jasti Chelameswar suggested that awareness is the way to finding solutions to the problem. This would be a solid step in that direction. Akshay doesn’t want to stop with this. Beyond making the play available in Tamil and accessible to more people, he would like to gather friends and colleagues in a class action habeas corpus suit to get undertrial prisoners free. Who knows where that will take him?

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