‘I feel people are afraid’: Playwright Alekar on India’s democratic values, threats to it

A child of India’s Independence, Alekar has been an engaged witness to the decades that followed the midnight when Jawaharlal Nehru declared a tryst with destiny. “Even in that troubled time, there were protests without fear. There was a very strong anti-Congress anger during the Emergency, which we all joined. We were against the attack on democracy,” he said.

Though he was among those caught in the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots and curfews, Alekar sensed another attack on democracy only after 2014. “Everything started to become of two colours only – are you with the majoritarian colour or against it? The latter are called urban naxal and anti-national. People stopped being vocal. Those who persisted were killed in broad daylight. Among them, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, Prof Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh, and there is no cue or clue about it. There is no kind of closure. This is very damaging to democracy and I feel that people are really afraid,” said Alekar.

Satish Alekar

Alekar’s sociopolitical concerns have taken the form of plays, such as Mahanirvan, which will celebrate 50 years in November 2024 and is still going strong in halls, and Begum Barve. One of the moving forces of Theatre Academy, an organisation dedicated to experimental plays, and the former director of Lalit Kala Kendra, Pune University’s department of performing arts, Alekar has created one of the most powerful and moving plays in the last decade of Indian politics, Thakishi Samvad.

“In this play, I wanted to correlate the protagonist’s journey with that of my generation. Our generation had parents who had fought against the British. After the 1942 movement, both my parents were in jail. My grandfather, from my mother’s side, had gone to jail. Today, a lot of talk goes on about the RSS, but growing up in Pune, most of our teachers belonged to the Sangh and our schools were managed by the organisation but none of us became pro RSS. Teachers never pushed their ideology on us,” said Alekar. This is the third time he is not directing a play he has written, handing the baton to Anupam Barve instead.

Rich in symbols, the play revolves around a 75-year-old protagonist who is approaching the end of his life all alone, except for hordes of Amazon boxes and a traditional doll of Maharashtra, the Thaki. He fills the silence with a conversation with the doll, reflecting the existential death of a person in a milieu that has killed freedom of expression. Like the majority of Indians who do not comment on political realities, even regarding pressing issues, the protagonist has never taken a position.

Like Alekar during the lockdown, who wrote the play amid waves of claustrophobia with politics, his protagonist is suffocated. Unlike the playwright, he is an icon of mediocrity who has turned whichever way the wind blew. “I wrote this play in 2022 because the changes happening around me had made me very restless,” Alekar said, adding that the results of the recent general elections hinted that people’s voices were not entirely silenced though “they took 10 years to be heard”.