The role of the people’s struggle in art and beauty informed playwright Safdar Hashmi’s body of work. Through the theatre company JANAM, he made nukkad-naataks or street plays an art form and he did that while recognising the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He staged Kursi, Kursi, Kursi before the Emergency to explore governmental power dynamics, Machine to amplify the demands of factory workers, and Hatyare to protest against communal violence in Aligarh.
But it was Machine that marked Hashmi’s entry into street plays. Him and director Rakesh Saxena wrote the script in a day after listening to a trade unionist describe the violent 1977 labour protest at a chemical factory in Ghaziabad, which resulted in the death of six workers. It was performed in Delhi on 15 October 1978, and is considered a landmark play in Indian theatre. It was Jan Natya Manch’s (JANAM), first full-length street play.
Moloyashree Hashmi, Hashmi’s wife and the head of JANAM, recalled that the audience’s response to Machine made them realise “they had done something that perhaps even they had not been able to fully explore”.
At the time, Hashmi had spoken about how art and culture are beautiful things but are part of the struggle in people’s lives. “He said, ‘Natak to hamein karna hai janta ke beech me, bade natak nahi toh chhote natak le jayenge.’ (We have to perform plays and we have to do it among the working class people. If we can’t do big plays, let’s do small ones).” It has remained with her since.
Thirty-five years after his death on 2 January 1989—he was attacked during a New Year’s Day performance of Halla Bol in Jhandapur, Uttar Pradesh—his legacy lives on in JANAM. His birth anniversary, 12 April 1954, is celebrated as National street Theatre Day.
The troupe performs his plays on the streets, in slums and in educational institutions across India. Since its inception in 1973, JANAM has staged over 8,500 performances in 140 cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Kerala and West Bengal.
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Issues of the people
Even as a student at Delhi University, Hashmi was drawn to politics and the performing arts. He was associated with the cultural unit of the Student’s Federation of India (SFI), and was also a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).
His childhood friend, director S Kalidas, remembers Hashmi as a “live wire” who was always surrounded by people.
“I feel guilty that he was fighting our battles for us, maybe not in a way that I would have fought. But I was not a part of them,” says Kalidas.
As JANAM emerged as a trailblazer in street theatre, it catered particularly to the working class. The shift towards street theatre was a pragmatic response to performance conditions.
After the Emergency was lifted, proscenium plays had no means to go forward, wrote JANAM member Sudhanva Deshpande in his book, Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar. It’s in this vacuum that street theatre was born.
Hashmi wanted to move beyond spontaneous or improvised performances towards a more intentional and theoretically grounded practice where the medium often serves as a platform for socio-political commentary.
“The issues of the people [he fought for] have not changed. They are still fighting for minimum wages, eight hours of work. Art has a role to play in the working class movement— call it street theatre, garden theatre or a park theatre—the medium or form doesn’t matter, the intent does. Relevance doesn’t come from specificity, it comes from connecting to an audience,” Moloyashree adds.
But above all Hashmi was a story-teller.
“He once said that he had eaten a live rat and mimicked the movements of his stomach with the mouse in it. He had a way with people and would always be convincing,” says his elder sister Shehla Hashmi.
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A fitting tribute
Hashmi was performing the street play, Halla Bol, when he was attacked on 1 January 1989. The play was left unfinished. Two days after his death, Moloyashree went back to the same spot where her partner was attacked and finished the play, along with the rest of the troupe. In his book, Deshpande mentions how the entire group staged the play with grim determination. He calls it the ‘single most important street theatre performance in the history of India.’
In a scene that required them to laugh, Moloyashree looked at everyone sharply and said, “What’s wrong with you all? Come on, laugh”.
“My grief was private, but theatre is a public act and we have a responsibility to the people. What could have been the artistic response? To go back and finish the play,” she says.
Songs were sung during the performance, which was attended by hundreds of people who mourned the loss of a man many described as India’s conscience.
One of the songs performed that day was Tu Zinda Hai, by Indian poet and lyricist Shailendra.
‘You are alive, so trust in the triumph of life/ if there is a heaven somewhere, then bring it to earth’.
“It was a fitting tribute. For Safdar was that, an exile from the future, Spartacus of the theatre, a non-believer whose doubt in the permanence of justice imbued him with an unshakeable faith that a just world could be created, here and now,” Deshpande writes.
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The fifth flame
Music composer Madan Gopal Singh, recalled visiting Qamar Azad Hashmi in 1996 around the time she was writing a biography of her slain son.
In conversation, Singh mentioned a line from philosopher and Sufi poet Bulleh Shah’s famous composition, Mast Qalandar, while talking about Safdar’s life: At your shrine four lamps light up the cardinal directions/ I come, Oh Lal sakhi, to light the fifth flame.
“She decided to keep it as the title of the book—The Fifth Flame: The Story of Safdar Hashmi. The tall, lanky fellow who was a romantic revolutionary and lit a flame that we all carry,” he says.
Hashmi would have turned 70 this year. According to Moloyashree, he did not like celebrating his birthday. He didn’t consider it a special day. “He’d be writing plays and acknowledging greetings, cursorily except when his nieces and nephews wished him. Safdar loved children,” she says.
Social media has changed the way we consume art. But there was no internet at the time Hashmi wrote and performed on stage. The internet would have interested him,” says Moloyashree.
“He would be doing more creative plays, writing more frequently, And he would have remained a Communist.”
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)