This year, Little Thespian devoted its 14th National Theatre Festival, Jashn-e-Azhar, to the oeuvre of senior Hindi author Partap Sehgal, hosting nine productions from northern India over six days. Due to the odd daytime scheduling, I managed to catch only four of them, including Sehgal’s two earliest dramas, Rang Basanti and Anweshak, both historical biographies (a favourite genre of his), a recent one set in contemporary society, Tin Gumshudā Log, and a dramatization of his verse.
When Sehgal penned Rang Basanti in 1981 to mark the 50th year of Bhagat Singh’s hanging, no notable plays existed on the revolutionary’s life. In the 1990s, Punjabi dramatist C. D. Sidhu wrote a trilogy on him, which won a Sahitya Akademi award and became the definitive biodrama. In fact, Little Thespian’s audience saw the third part of Sidhu’s trilogy at the very same festival in 2021. Obviously, Sidhu gave much more detailed treatment to Bhagat Singh, compared to which Rang Basanti now seems a capsule biography, though Sehgal does highlight Bhagat’s socialist-anarchist-atheist ideology and his love of reading. Director Kewal Dhaliwal abridged Manch Rangmanch’s original production for this revival, but Kushagr Kalia’s music punctuated the dialogue-heavy script with vigour.
Anweshak (1992) celebrates the mathematician and astronomer, Aryabhata. The problem here is chronological. Sehgal places Aryabhata in the reign of Budhagupta (ruled c. 476-495) and shows them as young friends, whereas Aryabhata was born in 476 and composed his Āryabhatiya between 499 and 510. Even if he had written it at the age of 20, Budhagupta would have already died. Sehgal also stresses Aryabhata’s heliocentric view of the solar system, which is disputed, whereas his explanation of eclipses, the Moon’s reflection of light, the Earth’s diameter and rotation on its axis are his acknowledged astronomical conclusions. Math is a difficult subject to present dramatically, otherwise Sehgal could have dwelt on Aryabhata’s calculations of variable quadratic equations and the value of π to four decimals. Nevertheless, Sehgal’s theme of Aryabhata’s fight against the royal pandits’ blind faith in convention rings true today under Ayaz Khan’s direction, who also carefully designs set pieces patterned after Aryabhata’s scientific instruments.
Sehgal himself dramatized Tin Gumshudā Log by stitching three of his short stories together, each on a lost soul or, from another perspective, a triangle of lost souls in each act. Except for the prologue by an unfortunately stumbling Farha Anwar, it holds our interest because she returns as the only woman in each story, characterizing them distinctively, and every episode segues silently into the next, leaving us to reflect on connections.
The first, “Jugalbandi”, develops a chance meeting between an aspiring author and a hack publisher (caricatured superbly by Gaurav Choudhary) who enter into an unlikely friendship that embraces the writer’s wife as well.
The second, “Crossroads”, is a why-not-to-commit-suicide tale, where a depressed professor learns of a colleague taking his own life, and shares his sorrow with a female colleague. This turns into a weak link because director Ashraf Ali casts in the lead Sumit Nandan, who has very poor verbal English (“message” becomes massege, etc), when he should have simply translated that part into Hindi—no essential reason for Nandan to speak in English.
The third, “Machhli machhli kitnā pāni”, recounts the breakdown over the years of a happy marriage as the husband grows jealous of his wife’s professional success, while the narrator feels attracted to her. In all the stories, unusually, Sehgal does not sentimentalize or moralize, and except in “Crossroads”, does not provide closures.
For Little Thespian’s production of Andhere Men (not to be confused with Sehgal’s adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy with the same title), Uma Jhunjhunwala theatricalizes poems from Sehgal’s collection Andhere Men Dekhnā on the subject of religious and existentialist darkness. The poetry is recited over the sound system as the performers interpret it through dance. However, most of the choreography derives from standard movement workshops, thus lacking innovation.
9 March 2025