Fire on the stage

Legendary theatreperson Habib Tanvir was physically attacked for his famous plays because he celebrated the secular folk traditions of the Indian countryside. His plays Jis Lahore Nahi Dekhya and Jamadarin/ Ponga Pandit were attacked by VHP/RSS  men in Gwalior, while Tanvir, 80, refused to succumb.

Jis Lahore Nahi Dekhya was written by noted Urdu writer Asghar Wajahat.  Ponga Pandit, composed originally by Chhattisgarhi playwrights Sukhram and Sitaram, resurrects rural aesthetics with spoof, caricature and laughter, while dissecting entrenched social layers. Tanvir’s Naya Theatre has been staging the plays since 1960s. After the Babri Masjid demolition, the Hindutva brigade found it objectionable and attacked it violently.

There has not been a larger ban on music, except for Kishore Kumar, who was banned from the All India Radio for not toeing the Sanjay Gandhi line during the Emergency. Kishore refused to accept the diktats of a budding dictator. The Heavy Metal band’s 2006 album Christ Illusion was surprisingly banned after Catholic churches took offence to the artwork of the album and a few song titles. The album was taken off the shelves.

In 1999, Maharashtra government banned Marathi play Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy, which, apparently, glorified the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The notification was challenged before the high court that rejected the ban. In 2004, Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues was banned in Chennai. The play has been a roaring success all over India. In a peculiar aberration, censorship of theatre in Maharashtra dates back to 1948. Theatre groups had to submit two copies of the script to Maharashtra State Performance Scrutiny Board to be finally cleared by the police. Amol Palekar and Alyque Padamsee led the campaign against these “bureaucratic restrictions”. The practice has now been stopped. — AS