Amritsar: Asghar’s play depicts pain of partition

Neha Saini

Amritsar, July 2

Manch Rangmanch in collaboration with Virsa Vihar opened the five-day national theatre festival, which will showcase five stand-out plays, curated by eminent theatre person Kewal Dhaliwal. The festival, which is an annual affair, will also bring to the fore the talent of several amateur and upcoming theatre actors, who attended a month-long national workshop by National School of Drama alumni, including Partho Banerjee and Kewal Dhaliwal.

The inaugural play was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic Romeo Juliet, directed by Partho Banerjee. Weaving emotions and social message in a story, the play begins with a conflict between two families — Montague and Capulet. The budding romance between Romeo and Juliet is depicted, which later triggers a chain reaction of events and ends on a tragic note. The play was performed to the tee by a group of budding artists from Manch Rangmanch.

On Day 2 of the festival today, Asghar Wajahat’s Jis Lahore Ni Vekhaya, O Jamya Ni (The one who has not seen Lahore, has not been born), directed by Kewal Dhaliwal, was staged. The layered story of a Muslim family’s migration during the Partition from Lucknow to Lahore, only to find their new home occupied by its former resident, an old Hindu lady who refuses to leave. With pangs of the pain induced by the Partition across the India and Pakistan being felt, the play depicted themes of abandonment, communal violence, human spirit and aftermath of the 1947 Partition, in a poignant story.

The play, whose title has become a popular phrase, often used to describe the charm of Lahore —Amritsar’s twin city— was written in the 1980s. Set in 1947, a Muslim family, who migrates from Lucknow to Lahore, is allotted a haveli vacated by a Hindu family. The drama begins when they meet an old Hindu woman, the previous owner of the haveli allotted to them, and she refuses to leave her home. Gradually, the shared trauma and pain of the Partition becomes a thread that joins the woman with the new occupants of her house, who become her new family. But the horrors of communal disharmony catch up and the family is threatened by local goons to hand over the Hindu woman to them. Eventually, she dies and chaos reigns once again, when the Muslim family decides to cremate the woman according to Hindu rituals, despite objections by their Muslim locality leaders. The climax depicts the despair and dilemma that followed everyone, irrespective of their religion, in the aftermath of the Partition of India and Pakistan.