THEATRE
Broken threads
MEENA MENON
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"Adhantar" keeps the memory of Mumbai's mill workers alive.
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Award-winning: A scene from "Adhantar".
WATCHING "Adhantar" at a time when most of Mumbai's mills have made way for malls and multiplexes takes you back to the 1990s when the shape of Central Mumbai, home to the city's mills, was fast changing. Written by journalist Jayant Pawar, who worked in a mill for eight years, the action takes place in a grimy one-room tenement. As the play unfolds, you are caught in the tension that pervades almost every scene and the claustrophobia of that tiny cramped space with its restless inhabitants.
The viewer is a voyeur, privy to the unguarded feelings of a family grappling with the reality of closing mills, the resultant unemployment, the desperate need for money and the need for love. Directed by Mangesh Kadam, the story is that of a mother, her three sons, and her daughter who is married to a textile worker.
Cataclysmic changes
It is almost 25 years since the major textile strike of 1982 and the award-winning play is being revived this year to mark that occasion. Pawar grew up in Parel and, at the age of 17, started working in a mill after his father's death. He experienced first hand the cataclysmic changes, which the play reflects with its close attention to detail and use of the Konkani dialect, peculiar to the workers.
"Mumbai will have a new history now but the people who made the city's history have all gone away," Pawar says. Workers have become unwanted and Mumbai's fighting spirit ended with the textile strike of 1982, he adds. The cultural divide in the city is also reflected in the play and so is the demise of the Left.
Women played a major part in the textile workers' struggle and the mother, played superbly by Jyoti Subhash, reflects their steely determination. Her slow patient movements hide the real tension in her character and her dialogues reflect the bitterness of her predicament: a wife who spent a number of years looking after her ailing husband, now dead. Despite having four children, she still sells lunches and stitches the odd dress for survival. The eldest son, Baba, is a poet and a dreamer who wants to write even better than Jean Paul Sartre. Disdainful of his family, he refuses to work and spends his time sitting in a corner reading or writing. His brother, Mohan, lies on the only cot in the room listening to cricket commentary, bitter too at times that his own chawl mates don't take him for matches. He lives a private fantasy where he will one day play professional cricket. The brother we see only in short dramatic bursts is the youngest Naru, who works for a gang. Naru is his mother's favourite, much to the irritation of the rest and he is the only one who gives her some money. The sister, Manju, who works in a factory, and her husband, who is on strike, form the rest of the family. The tiny space they live in and the constant need for privacy also reflects an underlying current of sexual suppression.
Age of despair
Tensions are always at the top and the repeated arguments between the mother and her children allow you to glimpse the gradual degeneration of their relations, leading to the climax. And so you know that Mohan lost his job, you learn that Manju had an affair with the local grocer's son and had an abortion, but later had to marry an older man who is not exactly her idea of a husband. Naru is a product of that age of despair, a time when the sons of jobless mill workers turned to criminal gangs. While one brother chooses the path of the pen, the other is inert and a third turns to criminal activity.
Through Manju's husband, Rane, you see the bitterness of the striking workers. After a long strike, the mill management forces a compromise and a drunken Rane comes home, flush with money and presents and tries to rationalise the closure of his mill. He also knows the reality, which is that the mill will never reopen. He wants to set up a vegetable stall and asks for Mohan's help, which is scornfully refused.
Rane's problems don't end there. Naru finds out about his sister's continuing affair with her former lover and assaults him. His shirt stained with blood, he drags Manju home. Rane is now completely shattered.
Uncompromising and realistic
But more drama is to come. The man Naru attacked dies and he has to go into hiding. He tells his mother to burn his bloody shirt and charges out. Finally when the old mother sets fire to Naru's shirt, it is a deliberate action, signifying an end to that part of her life. Phoenix-like, she and her family will rise again.
The play, first staged in 1997, has been acclaimed for its uncompromising and realistic depiction of the plight of what was once Mumbai's backbone, its working class. It captures the crushing hopelessness that prevailed after the closure of the mills and the havoc it caused in people's lives.
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