No room for tears

Swati Rai 

Swati dubey is fascinated by women in rural settings and her play, Agarbatti, is essentially about village women and by an all-women crew. This tale about conflicts — internal and external, gender and politics has been told in the backdrop of the Behmai massacre by Phoolan Devi and her gang, where men who had previously repeatedly gangraped her were lined up and shot at. The play is one of the finalists at the 14th Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards to be held in Delhi next week.

Dubey, 29, first showcased the play as part of her diploma presentation at the National School of Drama in 2017. Talking about the larger relevance of the theme, she first outlines that the background might be the Behmai incident, but the play is fictional. 

“After the massacre, the widows of these men took out a ‘widhwa yatra’ to demand justice for themselves as they had no hand in the crimes committed by their husbands. The government then opened a beedi factory for the women. Our play is set in this context where a group of these women work in an agarbatti (incense sticks) factory.”

She says that through their interactions, these women chart  their own journey of understanding the heinous crime committed by their husbands and of the caste dynamics at play.

“In the denouement, each character reaches, in her own way, an understanding of rising above caste and brings to the main character a resolution of her husband’s death,” she says.

To lend authenticity to the play and get into the skin of the characters, Dubey also met the widows in Behmai and interacted with them.

The language used in the play is a mix of Hindi and Bundeli. “When we performed Down South, we changed the language to Hindi and now that we are showing in North India, we have largely Hindi dialogues with a mix of Bundeli.”

While Dubey first presented the play with actors from the NSD, she also has it ready with another set of local actors form Jabalpur back home and has been performing all over the country, having at least two to three shows every month.

Dubey says the play has got standing ovation wherever it has been staged and considers this a bigger achievement than any financial returns on her creative investment.