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Behind the bodice
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Parnab Mukherjee captured the raw starkness of situations that bog women, with his interpretation of two short stories of Mahasweta Devi
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PHOTO: MURALI KUMAR K.
second sex Parnab Mukherjee’s performance lifted the veil on social and physical exploitation of women
“I am performing two short stories by Mahasweta Devi. She’s one of the few socially-conscious writers who have braved political atrocities on her body. Her art (of writing) is a craft. Mahasweta and her writing do no favours to anyone. And Mahasweta, in the thick of Nandigram, does not merely write about them, but becomes one of them…”
Parnab Mukherjee, clad in a black kurta pyjama, folds the multi-hued, striped carpet on the floor of Easy Library. In a hoarse, croaky voice, he says, “A small request…it’ll be a three-sided audience.” And plastic chairs are noisily dragged and relocated to form a horse shoe around a bigger carpet brought for the solo-performance of “And the Dead Tree gives no Shelter”.
Plastic bags are brought out; a clothes line is tied from one blue book rack in the corner to the yellow one on the opposite side. And Parnab snaps clothes clips and hangs thin coir ropes like nooses on the line. With just a plastic chair, a black dupatta, a Salvador Dali cheap cloth re-print of liquid clocks, and a brass mask, the gripping performance begins.
Mahasweta Devi’s “Breast-Giver” (Stanadayini) about a “mother-by-hire” is brought alive by Parnab Mukherjee in all its raw starkness and brutality. Jashoda, (interestingly a poor Brahmin rural dweller in the short story) becomes a ‘tribal’ woman in Parnab’s enactment. Jashoda has to feed her “half-man” of a husband Kangalicharan whose legs have been lost in an accident caused by the son of a feudal landlord, Haldar. She becomes a “professional mother” in the very same household of the landed gentry. Jashoda, the “mother-by-hire”, suffers from the image of the “goddess-infested reverse sexism of the Hindu majority”.
“She is 25, could be 35 or 45 – how does it matter,” says Parnab matter-of-factly. “She could be a young tribal woman anywhere – in Arastu, Chattisgarh or Tripura…”
Piercing and haunting lines engulf the play throughout, enhanced by a staggering performance by the “media analyst, workshop facilitator and creative mentor”.
The jeering, condescending lines delivered when he plays the role of Haldar as he eyes Jashoda’s body lustily and then dismissively settles the compensation for her husband’s accident, are captivating. He calls her husband a “half-man”, at once bringing to mind the scene from “Mother India” where metaphorically a “half-man” is a man who is devoid of his ‘masculinity’ and ‘maleness’.
He then swiftly becomes Haldar’s wife, cleverly adjusting Jashoda’s sari (the dupatta in his hand) and shoots appreciative looks at Jashoda’s “brown, round mounds of flesh” – a description that is used throughout the performance. The “brown, round mounds of flesh” shifts from being the male object of gaze and desire to the ‘monetary’ and ‘social’ exploitation of the female body, other than prostitution.
Forgotten facts about India’s first and current hockey captains being tribals are revealing and Jashoda’s ‘conscience’, consciousness and desperation in getting a livelihood are projected in all its angst and misery.
The bare truths after a point of time were too much to take for some of the audience-members, who rudely got up and left the performance, thoughtlessly and insensitively shuffling plastic chairs around.
Parnab delivered a powerful spell of words, comparisons and ideas. Of milkman Verghese Kurien’s ‘rural revolution’, of conscious tribals being labelled as reactionaries or Maoists – all of these which made the audience sit up and take notice of hard-hitting facts that we often choose to push “behind the bodice”.
“Behind the Bodice” (Choli ke Picche) delves into the layers of the breast as the object of gaze especially during the British era in India where the blouse was ‘introduced’ as a covering cloth of morality only for the upper-castes. This adopts a ‘contemporary’ topic of concern in the 1990s when there was a media-fuelled frenzy about the song Choli ke Picche from “Khalnayak”.
The third performance touched upon the ironies of the highly debatable fairness cream for men advertisement in a “fair republic”, corporate social responsibility and elite education meaning dropping lines from Shakespeare and seeking fellowships and grants from well-funded foundations.
The audience left with thoughts that didn’t leave them even in the parking lot. You remember Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” where Sethe is forced to milk, so that it can be sold as the lines from “Breast-Giver” resound:
“Is a Mother so cheaply made
Not just by dropping a babe”
AYESHA MATTHAN
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