Laugh Riots

The need to show an issue, Hindu-Muslim conflict, in a different perspective made Feroz Abbas Khan, the director of DTD, seek Khan’s writing services. Their film strings together several bizarre real-life events. Take for instance, where after a man, born Hindu but living with a Muslim widow for years, dies from an electric shock, villagers from both the communities claim the body, which results in riots. In another, a cop in Kolkata faces suspension when a police dog, under his charge, becomes pregnant. Then there’s one where an “innocent” thief is burnt alive when Hindu mobs attack a Muslim household during the Godhra riots. These, when assembled in a small-town setting, become a microcosm for India.

“These may seem surreal to the West, but our societies are full of such absurdities, nothing is fabricated and all that we’ve shown has really happened,” says 61-year-old Khan, sitting in his office, the Department of Theatre at the University of Mumbai, Kalina. A visiting faculty there for over a decade, he has recently been appointed as the head of the department.

A product of the Marathi experimental theatre movement of the late ’70s, Khan is known in theatre circles for his biting dark humour that “makes you laugh at things one shouldn’t laugh at: taboos such as death, war or riots”. “It’s a dangerous, tricky area, as people may get offended,” says Feroz, who describes his writing as something that can “stretch the most ridiculous to a point where it touches the heart”. He remembers Khan from the ’70s as “someone with an absurdist streak”, whose plays were being adapted in inter-collegiate drama competitions even while he was a student at Khalsa College. His seminal work Shobhayatra (2004) was adapted into many languages subsequently and even made into a Hindi feature film by the same name, which was also Khan’s feature film debut as a screenwriter. The play sets itself amid the mock rehearsal for an Independence Day parade, featuring nationalist heroes such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash  Chandra Bose.

The characters, who populate the world in Khan’s writing, such as those in DTD set in a coastal Konkani small town, are more symbols than characters “meaningfully designed to make the audience examine reality by trying to understand the bizarreness”. Khan jokingly says that his fascination with black humour may have to do with his Konkani-Muslim roots, where people from his village Banda, Sawantwadi district have a way of “talking in an oblique rather than a straightforward way”.

Khan’s works emerge out of the socio-political climate, as in the ’70s, when the Marathi theatre movement was looking to “address concerns of a new kind, of a new generation”. During that phase, Khan along with important theatre practitioners such as Satyadev Dubey, Makarand Sathe, Amol Palekar and Shriram Lagoo, broke the traditional norms of theatre to create an exciting, radical hybrid form.

Today, he says, the biggest crisis in Marathi theatre is not the lack of ideas but shortage of actors. “After spending three to four months in theatre, the actors shift to films and television. You can’t blame them, there is no money in theatre,” says Khan. Undeterred, he is working on his latest play, Dry Day, another satire that’s set in a city bar, where artists engage in conversations with the bar owner, an art enthusiast.

sankhayan.ghosh@expressindia.com