The quote above may sound like a joke, nevertheless, Peter Schumann, 77 years old (or rather young!) founder of Bread and Puppet Theater Company, Vermont, USA firmly believes in it and has been working relentlessly towards achieving his ‘ultimate’ goal for the past fifty years by raising questions through his art.
 
My five weeks’ apprenticeship with the Bread and Puppet Theater Company turned out to be an unforgettable experience. During my extensive interactions, with Peter Schumann and other puppeteers in the company, about their body of work, I could draw parallels between their and Jana Natya Manch’s (Janam) work where I have worked as an actor and director since 2004. For me, that was one of the most interesting facets of these conversations. It wasn’t only me, I think, Peter could also see these connections that tie far apart groups with one thread of commonality and purpose. I will talk about this later. Perhaps, that’s why after watching Lalit Vachhani’s film, Natak Jari Hai (2004), on Janam, Peter said to me, “We would like to call you (Janam) here. Our people need to know about your work and what happens in your country.”
 
Why Bread?
“We, says Peter Schumann, sometimes give you a piece of bread along with a puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. . . Theater is more like bread, more like a necessity.” It is this belief that makes him get up every morning at the crack of dawn and bake rye bread from a 150 year old Silesian sour-dough using the same technique that his mother used. He has been baking bread for many years now. Not only that, during their Domestic Resurrection Circus performances in Vermont, every single member of the audience (comprised of 30,000 people sometimes) used to get at least one piece of bread baked by him. During one of the conversations, Elka Schumann, Peter’s wife said that very often when they go on tours, they ask their hosts to arrange for bricks among other requirements for their performances for Peter to make a temporary oven!
Peter Schumann’s beliefs, politics, passion for art and to some extent a bit of ‘positive insanity’ helped him and other puppeteers in the company build a ‘counter-culture institution’ like Bread and Puppet Theater.
 
The sculpting years
Peter Schumann, a sculptor and dancer by training, was born in Silesia, Germany (now a part of Poland). He moved to the Lower East Side of New York City, United States in 1961 with his wife, Elka Schumann, and children. In 1963 Peter Schumann, Bruno Eckardt and Bob Ernstthal founded Bread and Puppet Theater. Those were also the formative years of American avant-garde movement. Peter Schumann was inspired by the works of American avant-garde artistes of the time – John Cage, Merce Cunnigham, Allan Kaprow and many others. One can see their influences in Schumann’s work. For the next few years Bread and Puppet Theater conducted puppet making workshops and created shows with children from the poor neighborhood. In fact, one of their most famous puppet character Uncle Fatso was created by Puerto Rican children in the locality. In their early productions they took up local issues like voters registration and rent related problems in the community. Lot of children and adults from the community participated in these shows. They began with small masks and puppets, but soon the scale grew bigger. The Christmas Story, The King’s Story, The Puppet Christ are few of their early productions. In their initial years, Bread and Puppet experimented with the ‘conventional’ form, style and scale of the puppets and still continue to do so.
 
In 1964 when US President Lyndon Johnson gave orders to conduct bombing raids on North Vietnam, Bread and Puppets Theater, as politically conscious group, decided to respond. They produced a series of anti-war performances, parades and pageants with giant puppets on the streets of New York City. Their performances created a stir among the locals and, of course, the police. Soon, Bread and Puppet became “anti-war militants” in the city.
 
Christian Dupavillon in his book Bread and Puppet Theater: Spectacles En Noir et Blanc (1978) wrote about one such anti-war performance.

“. . . in New York, a woman placed a bloody doll on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (placard read) ‘I am Mary. My baby was napalmed in Vietnam.’ Behind, Mary stood Joseph, the shepherds and the three kings. (placard read) ‘We are the shepherds. We were watching the sheep. We are the three kings. We followed a star.’ Five days in a row they enacted the same scene, despite the threats of the police who wanted to arrest them for illegal wearing of masks.”

Lot of young people got attracted to these avant-garde productions, and participated and walked on the streets shouting anti-war slogans accompanied by life size puppets.
 
During their puppet museum tour for apprentices it was evident that Bread and Puppet commented, through its art, on almost every issue of socio-political relevance at the National or International level.  Over the years they have raised their voice and narrated the stories of struggle, courage and hope from across borders.
 
From city to countryside
The Bread and Puppet Theater shifted its base from New York City to Vermont, a state in New England on the North-eastern coast of the USA. It became theater-in-residence in Goddard College in Plainfield where Schumann started taking workshops on puppetry. Later in 1974 the company shifted to another farm, originally owned by Elka Schumann’s family, outside the town of Glover and has since been settled there. The sheer geographical area of the farm gave them an unimaginable freedom to create their art work and performances. There was space to build a residency theater, puppet museum, print shop, and to produce a big circus show in the horse-shoe shaped gravel pit which Peter thought of using as an outdoor amphitheater.
When asked how the idea of creating the circus emerged in his mind, Peter Schumann rightly puts it, “Round landscape needed round shows. So (I thought) let’s do circus!”
 
The Domestic Resurrection Circus was staged for the first time in Cate Farm in Plainfield in 1970.  The Circus also changed its base from Plainfield to Glover in 1975. John Bell, Professor in Emerson College in Boston and ex-member of Bread and Puppet in his article says, “Our Domestic Resurrection Circus was a complex mix of avant-garde forms, political ideals, populist aspirations, and a definite desire to present an alternative to mass-media, capitalist culture.”
Although the first Circus show had about some 700 audience members, later from 1975 to 1998 Bread and Puppet performed astonishing, spectacular shows on one weekend of every summer to an audience comprising of 30,000 people! The Circus had grown bigger in terms of participation of the volunteers and the number of audience that attended the show. The repertoire of the company also grew in terms of themes of the shows which therefore over the years, kept on adding to their massive collection of puppets from previous performances. Professor John Bell continues:
“The organizational structure within the Bread and Puppet Theater, developed in response to the requirements of the Circus -- organically (as it were) in an anarchistic fashion, which is to say, in response to situations as they developed, with individual members of various committees taking on responsibilities. . . All met regularly with the Schumanns and other puppeteers. This organizational democracy was quite different from the artistic leadership of Bread and Puppet, which remained clearly the purview of Peter Schumann.”
 
But it’s a pity that Bread and Puppet had to wind up the Circus in 1998 after an unprecedented incident of the killing of an audience member during the Circus weekend in the camp area near the circus field. It was harsh a decision, since the Circus was one of their main sources of income (through donations and sales of posters and other material).  The Circus also fetched those touring shows which ensured the company’s financial sustainability though out the year.
Moreover, the Circus had remained, since mid 70s’, their main performance of the year. Therefore, after wrapping it up they had to also think of their yearly programmes in a totally different manner. After the Circus was over during an interview with writer and activist Marc Estrin, Peter Schumann said,
 
“We want to make this big mass and mass participation event into an event with smaller masses, but saying basically what wants to be said. . . It won’t be this craze of four weeks, dropping everything we do and getting something out there. Instead, we will hopefully be able to continue our gardening through the summer, to spread the shows and allow us to do our normal chores and normal lives.”
 
The performances
Bread and Puppet‘s body of work has always remained experimental in nature. However, on one hand, it has never lost its simplicity in the name of experiment and on the other hand, the politics has never been compromised either. The idea behind keeping the acts simple is not to dilute the politics but to raise the participation of the community. But I think, sometimes, there is also a risk of over-simplification of the issue to the extent that it loses its gravity and complexity and stops provoking audiences. I suppose, the puppeteers also understand this risk. Therefore, they recognize the significance of constant upgradation of knowledge and information about what is happening in the world around them. I could see everyone putting a conscious effort in this direction. During their summer programme, every evening, it is a ritual to listen to Democracy Now, a local news based radio programme.
 
Bread and Puppet believes in collective effort which ultimately leads to collaborative theater and community building. For all these years it has worked on different forms of puppet theatre or rather one should say, on improvised form(s) of puppet theatre which has maximised people’s participation as much as possible. Another way of getting new people into the company is their Summer Apprenticeship programme. Apprentices interested in puppetry and theater stay on the farm and help the core puppeteer team to create shows for that year. It is like hands-on training that they get on the job. It has become a trend that every year some apprentices stay for longer and out of those few, some become resident puppeteers. In a way this internship programme has helped the company fulfill its human resource needs. According to Linda Elbow, manager and full time puppeteer with the company, “Apprenticeship programme fee helps us generate share of revenue along with money we generate through summer tours.” But one should not think the company does only revenue generating shows. Often, they do free shows for local library, hospitals, old age homes etc.
 
The company has many different types of performances. Parades, pageants and circus are some of the earlier performances created by the company. One is not saying that Bread and Puppet invented these forms. On the contrary, it is a well known and accepted fact that the company has taken its cue from the medieval European pageants and parades. Large numbers of volunteers from the community come every year to help the puppeteers to put together these shows in every summer.  
 
After choreographing puppets for so many years, Peter Schumann decided to form the Lubberland National Dance Company with the belief that anyone can dance. The idea was to combine puppetry with dancing with an unconventional approach. Mostly abstract in nature, the politically charged Lubberland dances were choreographed in manner that people from the community can be taught with in few hours of rehearsal on the day of the show. The dance show happens in the Dirt Floor Cathedral or Paper Maché Cathedral, the only indoor performing space on the farm. One would immediately realise why it is popularly known as Paper Maché Cathedral. Small paper maché puppets with odd body shapes and sizes are fixed on the walls and the roof resembling Biblical images in an old church.
 
From pageant to circus to Lubberland dances, music has been a running motif, an integral part of all Bread and Puppet Theater performances. Music is everywhere. Some of the music has been originally composed by the band itself. Highly influenced by the Dixieland Jazz band, Bread and Puppet has constantly improvised old jazz numbers. The band has wide collection of tunes that it plays sometimes as prelude and sometimes as part of a performance. Whether it is ‘Cannon Song’ from Threepenny Opera, ‘ Carvan’ by Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington, or a traditional Jewish tune ‘Klezmer’ or the old American gospel songs like ‘Down by the Riverside’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, the band has it all. It composes background scores and performs live during Circus performances. The company also uses music to bind the community by holding weakly community singing sessions of Sacred Harp hymns. Elka Schumann conducts these sessions.
 
Elka Schumann – behind the curtain
Undoubtedly, in my view, it is Peter Schumann’s genius and commitment towards his work that has brought Bread and Puppet Theater to this stature. But the name that sometimes goes unstated is Elka Schumann, whose tremendous support has helped her husband build such a body of work. She has been associated with company since its inception in the 60s. Apart from being Peter Schumann’s wife, she has played many other vital roles in the history of the company. She has worked as puppeteer, started the print shop, curated the Puppet Museum and started the tradition of Sacred Harp singing-music tradition from South America, and also worked as a manager in the company for some years. She is not merely a spectator and a fan of Peter’s creativity but also the biggest critic of his work. This writing is also a tribute to Elka Schumann’s organizing genius.
 
Every summer during internship programme, Peter Schumann, with uncombed long gray hair and shirt tied on his waist, can be seen baking bread, making big masks and giant puppets, playing the violin, painting tall banners and practicing on 11 feet tall stilts. I don’t think it would be wrong to say that Bread and Puppet Theater makes ‘jack of all trades, and master of none.’ A gardener on the farm can play bass drum in the band or the cook in the kitchen can create traveling puppet shows and a farmer makes cantastoria performances. Here, nobody has an expertise in only one area. Every body needs to learn how to make puppets, sing, paint, print and even how to clean out houses and do composting. Each individual on the farm has to create, make mistakes, make amendments and re-create. As Peter, rightly puts it, “Five wrongs can get you half right”. But yes the politics has to be right.

Actually there are three parts of the space – the terrace for rehearsal; top floor flat as office, library and workshop; and on the ground floor the actual black box theatre space, “STUDIO SAFDAR, Shadi Khampur”.

The rehearsal space was be inaugurated by Kajal Ghosh a long time associate of ours, who was in Janam in the early years; the top floor by veteran trade unionist Comrade Mohanlal of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions who has supported our work for more than thirty years; “STUDIO SAFDAR, Shadi Khampur” by Shubha Mudgal, the eminent singer-musician.In the evening there was a more extended cultural programme on the occasion of the inauguration and National Street Theatre Day.

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Safdar's funeral saw a huge turnout of people from all walks of life, but particularly of workers from Delhi and adjoining areas. This was their way to mourn the death of an artist who had used his art to articulate their life. Most of them had to take leave from duty to join the funeral. But that was not all. Even in mourning, the actors of Janam returned to the spot in Jhandapur, Sahibabad on January 4, 1989, to finish the incomplete play, Halla Bol, and to assert the fundamental right of freedom of expression. Thousands of people joined the event in support and to provide strength to Janam.

The actors of Janam and the people of Jhandapur have not let the performance of January 4, 1989 be an isolated incident. Every year they join hands to organise a joint programme of workers and artists to pay respect to Safdar, reaffirm their commitment to the values that Safdar stood for and to present an afternoon of vibrant and robust art where the creators and recipients of art stand in view of each other.

It is interesting that the Martyrdom Day of Safdar Hashmi is observed not on January 2 every year, when Safdar actually breathed his last, but on January 1 – the day on which Janam was attacked. What is observed is not only the memory of an extraordinary artist and activist, but the ideals for which he and his comrades strove, the ideas which enabled them to weave extraordinary tales from the pains and joys of ordinary people.

Over the last few years, Janam and the CITU have jointly organised programmes in the run-up to the January 1 programme at Jhandapur. This year too, a two-day creative workshop was held on  December 26 and 27 at the Safdar Hashmi Memorial at site-four Sahibabad. Janam members and volunteers arranged stalls, each for a different activity, for children. Scores of children from schools around the Jhandapur area thronged the stalls for two days. There they engaged in singing, story telling, clay modelling, wall painting, thread painting and block printing. They also made wall hangings and learnt how to rub colour impressions of corrugated surfaces onto plain paper. At the end, the children collected a number of freshly created art works, a promise of trying out these experiments back at home. The venue itself was converted into a colourful place.

The annual programme at Ambedkar Park in Sahibabad on the first day of the New Year held promise of something special. This year, children from local schools of the area held a significant space in the schedule of performances. They had been preparing for this event for over two weeks. Under the guidance of Komita Dhanda, a Janam actor, students of the Great Child Public School, Karkari, Sahibabad, prepared three separate cantastoria performances. Cantastoria is an illustrated narration in which stories are told with the help of visuals. This, however, is not a new method. It is similar to the pictorial storytelling of the Patkatha artists from Bengal or the Kawadi tradition of storytelling from Rajasthan which uses painted folding boxes. In the cantasoria form, a picture or a series of pictures illustrating various scenes from the story is presented before the audience.

The significance of the Jhandapur experiment was that though known forms of cantastoria, patkatha and kawad are meant for small audiences, Ambedkar Park at Jhandapur was filled to its brims with hundreds of workers and their families. So the illustration had to be large enough for the entire audience to be able to see. So, instead of presenting the different scenes of the story in turns, all the scenes were painted on a very large canvas which was then held up for the audience by two children. Along with the illustrations, groups of children sung out the stories. These were simple stories about land grabbing, the diversion of water through large dam projects and other forms of struggle over resources. Remarkable was the simplicity with which these stories transformed these complex issues, so that they could be comprehended by children. The vast audience watched with rapt attention, a reaction which showed that the children’s performance was a hit.

The other highlight of the afternoon was the puppet performance by the students of the Avinash Chand Chadha Rajkiya Bal Vidyalaya, Jhilmil Colony. Under the guidance of Komita Dhanda and with help from Anand, a puppeteer from Kattkatha (a puppet theatre ensemble based in Delhi), the students had created several giant puppets who represented the characters of the story. These puppets were then manipulated on stage by two to three children. The technique brought together the tradition of the Japanese Bunraku puppets with the use of giant puppets by the Bread and Puppet, a political theatre group based in Vermont, USA. Komita had been an intern with the Bread and Puppet theatre earlier in the summer.

The story itself was told through the conversation between a little girl and a tree. The tree is ready to leave the forest as he fears that the industrialist who has just bought the land would cut him down. Answering the little girl's queries the tree explains the exploitative mechanism through which a poor peasant family is forced to give up their rural livelihood and migrate to the city. There too they find no respite as the system continues to grind them. With a combination of puppetry, enactment and background singing the ground came alive.

Both the forms performed by the children were examples of the use of large dimensions to create art forms for the enjoyment of masses. Hopefully, this intervention would ignite the interest of the people of the area, particularly the children to engage in art.

But that was not all. The cultural fare for the afternoon had started with Janam singing revolutionary songs. The Jana Natya Manch of Kurkshetra also participated with their singing. Janam performed two of its street plays. Private Pani narrated the woes caused by increasing government policies of the privatisation of water distribution. The play connected very well with the experiences of the audience. There have been several incidents in the industrial township in which the dominant political parties have sought to convert the scarcity of water into a conflict within the community. Janam also performed Machine, a play which was first performed in 1978, based on a strike and subsequent repression at the Herig India factory in Ghaziabad. But though the play was created in 1978, its sharp analysis of the capitalist system has rendered it to the status of a classic which is as relevant today as it was 34 years ago.

The chief speaker at the public meeting was Dipankar Mukherjee, former MP and national secretary of the CITU. At the beginning of his address, he quipped that he would prefer not to be introduced as a leader as that is a much discredited term today. He stressed on the importance of more such performances as seen that afternoon which would help the people who are at the receiving end of the corrupt and anti-people policies to analyse their conditions. He urged them to join struggles with renewed vigour. Speaking on the occasion, P M S Grewal, secretary of the Delhi state unit of CPI(M), gave a clarion call to all assembled to join the general strike on February 28.

On January 2, an intimate meeting was held in which Janam members recounted the memory of Safdar Hashmi. On this occasion, Suneet Chopra of the All India Agricultural Workers Union reminisced his memories of Safdar. He knew Safdar and Janam since his student days in the early seventies. Suneet Chopra recounted for the audience Safdar's commitment to the politics of the Left and to his art. But the most important part of Safdar's personality was though he was a gifted artist, he never carried the impression of being a star with him. This allowed him to make friends galore and remain extremely approachable for all. The result could be seen in the huge number of people who thronged his funeral. On this occasion Vijay Kalia, a Janam member since the early 1980s and Bipasha Banerjee, a relatively new entrant, spoke on their impression of Safdar Hashmi and his work.

On the January 3 evening, Janam members participated in a poetry reading session in which selected poems on the theme of childhood were read.

Arjun

Jhandapur itself is about 14 kilometres from the centre of Delhi. It is an urban village near Maharajpur, housing mainly industrial workers. There are a large number of industrial establishments here, in what is called the Site IV, Sahibabad Industrial Area. Many are relatively small units, but some are large, like bicycle manufacturers, iron smelters, pharmaceutical units, machine tools manufacturers, employing a thousand workers or more.

Given its proximity to Delhi, and especially because of its proximity to Anand Vihar which is becoming a major transport hub, the area itself is changing quite rapidly. Over the past five-seven years, many industrial establishments have shut down. On both sides of the Maharajpur border stand imposing shopping malls, and there is another big mall down the road near the Dabur factory. As you turn left to go towards Jhandapur past Maharajpur, you can see a huge ‘business park’ on the right and a Ford Endevour showroom on the left. Both stand at sites that housed factories earlier. Indeed, many factories in the area have shut down, because the owners find it more profitable to sell or rent out the premises. While the industrial area is still pretty large, the signs of de-industrialisation are also unmistakable.

As you go into Jhandapur (or anywhere in the Site IV Industrial Area, for that matter), you can sense a feeling of anxiety and anger among the workers. There is an overall sense of something smoldering below the surface. In the second week of November, a manager of a brake-shoe manufacturing unit in the area was killed following an altercation with workers. 27 workers have been accused of beating him to death, including two senior trade union leaders, neither of whom was present at the site of the incident. A further 350 unidentified workers are named in the FIR.

Upendra Jha, a CITU leader and one of the speakers at the rally of workers on January 1 following the performance of Jana Natya Manch’s play, did not refer to this particular incident in his speech – but he did not need to. When he spoke about the conditions under which workers today have to work, the audience of several thousand understood exactly what he was referring to, because the conditions at the brake-shoe factory are in no way unique. The two major issues facing workers today, he said, are (1) while the workday is supposed to be eight hours, everywhere 12 hours is becoming the norm, and (2) a large majority of workers are kept on contract and not regularised, even though they may have worked at a factory for as long as a decade.

Consider the case of the brake-shoe factory where the incident took place. Frontline magazine reports that this company ‘employed workers on contract basis and it is said that even workers who had put in over ten years of service had not been regularised. The company has 375 workers on its permanent rolls and 900 on contract; of the 900, around 700 are employed in direct production work, which is of a permanent nature.’ In other words, workers who are doing non-seasonal, steady, stable production work for years are not given the security of employment. Naturally, one of the major demands in this company (as elsewhere) is that workers on regular, production-related work be given regular employment.

Jha made the observation that increasingly, the type of people that the management was employing as ‘managers’ was changing – in the past managers had no compunctions in turning to goons to intimidate workers, but now increasingly, goons themselves were being employed as managers. When Jha said that today ‘personnel manager’ means a person with a pistol, a murmur of recognition ran through the workers, who knew this to be all too true. Again, though Jha did not take names, the case of the brake-shoe factory should be noted. A few weeks before the incident in mid-November, the management had sacked eight workers without notice. A number of other provocative steps were also taken by the management. The workers had remained peaceful, and wanted to sort out the issue through negotiation. On the day of the incident, the management arbitrarily moved two union leaders to different departments without even informing them. When the workers protested, the manager opened fire. This led to the altercation that resulted in his death. Jha said that the workers were not going to take the strong arm tactics of the management lying down, and warned of impending struggles if the employers did not mend their ways. The meeting to celebrate the legacy of the communist artist Safdar Hashmi became, quite fittingly, an occasion to assert workers’ rights and solidarity.

The other speakers at the meeting included Vasudev, Rajasthan state secretary of the CPI (M), and Amra Ram, leader of the legislative group of the CPI (M) in the Rajasthan assembly. Vasudev paid glowing tributes to Safdar Hashmi. He recalled that barely a week before the fatal attack in Jhandapur, Safdar had come to Sadarshahar in Rajasthan with Jana Natya Manch. Janam had performed Halla Bol (the play which was to be attacked in a week’s time) and Aurat. Watching Halla Bol, Vasudev, said, was a moving and inspiring experience, because the play was connected to the struggles of the Delhi working class. Vasudev recalled that after the play, he said to Safdar that Janam must prepare a similar play on the peasant situation. He said that his connection with Safdar was very personal, since his wife also acted in plays, and in fact the very first meeting he attended, just a day after his wedding, was to protest Safdar’s killing.

The programme on January 1 this year began with Janam singing songs in memory of Safdar and performing its new play, Jab Chale Khap Ka Latth, on the infamous khap panchayats. After the play, there was a performance of a play by Jana Natya Manch, Kurukshetra, based on Munshi Premchand’s classic story, Sadgati. The group also sang a number of melodious songs.

The attack took place on  January 1, 1989, and Safdar died in hospital on the 2^nd. Accordingly, every year on that day, Janam organises a small intimate meeting where friends and comrades remember Safdar and share his memories. This is also a wonderful way of acquainting younger comrades with the many facets of his personality. This year, the main speaker at the meeting was Murli Manohar Prasad Singh, who used to be a leader of the teachers’ movement in Delhi University and is now connected with the Janwadi Lekhak Sangh. He recalled that he first met Safdar in the early 1970s, when Safdar was still a teenager and Singh himself was a Naxal. Safdar posed some sharp questions to him. Later, during the Emergency, when Singh was arrested, he recalled that the police also questioned him about how he knew Safdar. After his release, and his disenchantment with Naxal adventurism and their refusal to take part in mass politics, Singh came over to the CPI (M) and had occasion to work closely with Safdar over several years.

The other speakers at the meeting were Sania Hashmi and Brijesh. Sania, a Janam actor who is also Safdar’s niece, was four when he was killed, and came into Janam later because she wanted to connect with Safdar’s work. Brijesh, Janam actor and writer, came in contact with Safdar because he was part of a group of young doctors who were in the 1980s quite interested in cultural activities. He recalled how Safdar gradually started bringing him closer to the movement without his even realising it. He was appreciative of the fact that Safdar had a way of communicating his politics without thrusting it upon people.

Janam also organises a poetry reading session in memory of Safdar, since he himself was very fond of poetry. Last year, poems by Faiz and Majaz were read, and this year, the focus was on three more centenarian poets: Nagarjun, Shamsher, and Kedar Nath Agarwal.

Sudhanva Deshpande

sarkash

 View Sarkash Photographs and  Videos

noun a rebel, a person who resists control adjective rebellious, defiant usage ‘mere sarkash tarane sun ke duniya ye samajhti hai / ke shayad mere dil ko ishq ke nagmoo.n se nafrat hai . . .’ ~ Sahir Ludhianvi

SARKASH bring together some of India’s best-known performers for eight exhilirating days in Mumbai. The venue is Prithvi Theare in Juhu, India’s premier performance venue. The organisers are Jana Natya Manch, the Delhi-based theatre company best known for their street theatre, set up in 1973 by Safdar Hashmi and others.

SARKASH is a fund-raising festival for Janam, which dreams of building an alternative theatre space in Delhi.

SARKASH also showcases Street : Theatre, an exhibition and sale of vintage photographs from the Archives of Jana Natya Manch. Considered as key collectibles for Indian performance history, these photographs draw from the early days of Janam’s work in the early 1980s which steered and shaped modern street theatre in India.

SARKASH is a composite of sangeet (music), rang (theatre), kala (art) and shabd (word).

SARKASH is the power of art, the audacity of a dream.

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Safdar Hashmi was born to Haneef Hashmi and Qamar Azad on 12 April 1954 in Delhi. He spent his childhood in Aligarh and finished his schooling in Delhi. He did his M.A. in English literature from Delhi University. After short stints of teaching in the universities of Garhwal, Kashmir and Delhi he worked in the Press Institute of India and then joined as the Press Information Officer of the Govt. of West Bengal in Delhi. In 1984 he gave up his job to work full time as a political cultural activist.

Safdar, a founder member of Janam, was a brilliant theoretician and practitioner of political theatre, especially street theatre. A versatile personality, he was a playwright, a lyricist’ a theatre director, a designer and an organizer He also wrote for children.

His film scripts were much acclaimed. He wrote on various aspects of culture and related issues in journals and newspapers. Safdar was a member of the C.P.I. (M). His creativity and ideology were inseparable. In recognition of his contribution to the street theatre movement and to the growth of a democratic culture, the Calcutta University in 1989 conferred on Safdar the degree of D.Litt. posthumously

On January 2, 1989, the convenor of Janam, Safdar Hashmi, died in a New Delhi hospital following a murderous attack on Janam activists the previous day by anti-social elements patronized by the ruling vested interests. Janam was performing Halla Bol in Jhandapur, Sahibabad, in support of the workers’ demands led by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). People from all walks of life – workers, political activists, artists and intellectuals – came together spontaneously in a massive, unprecedented protest against this brutal murder. Today, Safdar’s name has become synonymous with street theatre and the progressive cultural movement in India.