Ravinder Kaul
JAMMU, Mar 18: Presenting a serious play before an overwhelmingly young audience, uninitiated in the finer nuances of theatrical art, is not an easy task. That young Ifra Kak, the director, succeeded in conveying the humanist message of the play ‘Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya, O Jamyai Nai’ to the gen-next at the jam-packed Zorawar Singh Auditorium at Jammu University here this evening is no mean achievement. That the play also proved to be a treat for the connoisseurs and serious practitioners of theatre is the icing on the cake.
The performance was a result of a month long workshop conducted by Ifra Kak with the students of Department of Hindi, Jammu University. The hard work put in the students was apparent as they almost flawlessly handled the complex situations in the play. The performance belonged to the young actors, for many of whom it was their first time on stage.
‘Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya, O Jamyai Nai’ is Asghar Wajahat’s most celebrated play. It was first performed under the direction of Habib Tanvir in 1989, who subsequently took it to Karachi, Lahore, Sydney, New York and Dubai. The play has also been performed in several regional languages.
The play relates the story of an old Hindu lady who is found in a Haveli in post partition Lahore, freshly allotted to immigrants. She refuses to leave her beloved city and eventually endears herself to the local population despite the best efforts of wicked fundamentalists. Good triumphs over evil and humanity over communalism.
What distinguished Ifra’s conceptualisation of the play, mounted on an experimental set, is that she does not see the Partition in 1947 as the only time in South Asia when people were forced to abandon their centuries old places of habitat and move to unseen, unknown places in order to survive. She feels that it happens all the time and has been experienced so frequently in the post partition India that the ‘Old Hindu Lady’ of the play can be seen in our age and in our time in any temporary tenement in Muthi (Jammu) or Muzzafarnagar, Godhara or Ahmedabad. She emphasised this point by adding a slide-show at the end of the play, highlighting the migrations/emigrations that have become a part of our everyday existence in modern day India. The soulful musical backdrop of ‘Watana Ve, O Mereya Watna Ve’ made this presentation truly poignant.
“Perhaps we are all refugees from something”, says Sarah Jordan (played by Angelina Jolie) in a poignant sequence from Martin Campbell directed film ‘Beyond Borders’. This deeply meaningful, simple line was the leitmotif of Ifra’s directorial vision for Asghar Wajahat’s play ‘Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya, O Jamyai Nai’.
Vice Chancellor Jammu University M P S Ishar gave away Certificates to the participants of the Workshop while Dr. Parmeshwari Sharma, Head of the Hindi Department, conducted the proceedings quite admirably.
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