A first: Local play to be staged in Delhi

Tribune News Service

Jammu, March 1

For the first time, a local playwright’s play has been selected at the Shri Ram Centre, New Delhi, and will be released on March 7. He is associated with a Jammu-based theatre.

The play, ‘Vanidafan’, written by Jammu playwright Vikram Sharma, is being produced by Delhi-based group ‘Robroo’. The tickets for the play are available on BookMyShow.

The play is based on a ghastly ritual in practice among some tribal groups on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where girls are exchanged in forced marriage to different communities over land feuds. Vani is a custom in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where girls, often minors, are given in a marriage or servitude to an aggrieved family as compensation to end disputes, often murder. Vani is a Pashto word derived from ‘vanay’, which means blood. It is also known as ‘sak’ and ‘sangchatti’ in different regional languages of Pakistan.

In the play, the main character, a girl named Vaziya, makes a plan to end the ghastly ritual and offers herself as vani to the head of the tribal lord. She takes the close aide of the tribal lord, a eunuch, into confidence and hatches the conspiracy to end the custom of vani in the tribe.

In the process, she is faced with an uphill task of controlling the rough manly dominance in the tribe and eventually succeeds in abolishing the custom, but not before proclaiming a verdict on her own son, who has raped a tribal girl.

To uphold the ethics of the changed scenario of the tribes, Vaziya shoots her son, which forms the climax of the play. Director Kajal Suri said designing the play in Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal culture was a great challenge.

Though laws in 2005 and 2011 have declared the practice illegal in Pakistan, the custom still continues.

In 2004, the Sindh High Court outlawed all such “parallel justice” systems. But the writ of the government is weak in rural areas and the local police often turn a blind eye. “It is a great honour for Jammu that a play written by Vikram Sharma has earned a milestone for Jammu theatrics. He is a prolific playwright and director,” said Lalit Magotra, president, Dogri Sanstha and also a Sahitya Akademi awardee.