Published in Theatre of the Earth: Clarifying the Trajectory by Kanhailal Heisnam (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2016)
Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” appeared for the first time in a collection called Agnigarbha in 1978 post-Emergency Calcutta. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of the same appeared in the winter issue of Critical Inquiry in 1981:
Draupadi’s black body comes even closer. Draupadi shakes with an indomitable laughter that Senanayak simply cannot understand. Her ravaged lips bleed as she begins laughing. Draupadi wipes the blood on her palm and says in a voice that is as terrifying, sky splitting, and sharp as her ululation, “What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?” She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, “There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, counter me—come on, counter me-?” Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid.2
Twenty years later, in 2001, while still in college, I watched Manipuri director H. Kanhailal’s play Draupadi performed in Kolkata at the Academy of Fine Arts at a festival organised by Nandikar. During the climax, veteran actress Sabitri Heisnam appeared in the nude on stage. Describing the climactic section of the play as it appears in Amar Kanwar’s film, Deepti Misri has written:
In the segment of the performed play included in Amar Kanwar’s 2007 documentary The Lightning Testimonies (Roushan Bayaan), Sabitri, her back to the audience, advances menacingly toward the soldier, initially holding together at her front the single length of cloth that has been handed back to her after her rape. As she approaches the now cowering soldier, she opens her cloth all at once with a bloodcurdling scream: “Confront my body!” Swirling the cloth around to almost completely cover the soldier, she stands naked over him.3
In July 2004, a group of Manipuri women stripped naked in front of the Western Gate of Kangla. The 17 Assam rifles personnel had picked up Thangjam Manorama from her house and shot her dead on 11th July. The possibility of rape was acknowledged, there was evidence of bullet wounds on her private parts4. Manorama was a little over thirty and suspected of insurgency. I quote from a news report that appeared in The Sangai Express:
Following the naked outburst of anger and bottled up rage, the district administration of the two districts of Imphal acted swiftly and imposed an indefinite curfew in Greater Imphal areas from 11 am today.[…] Policemen who rushed to the site found themselves in an awkward position not knowing how to deal with the women who had bared all. The women folks raised a number of slogans, questioning, how long they have to suffer, while their sons and daughters are being trampled, tortured, raped and killed by the security personnel.5
From the evidence and interviews I have gathered so far on the field during the course of my research on the subject, I am fairly certain now, that the women who participated in the protest at the gates of Kangla in July, 2004 were not aware of the existence of Kanhailal’s Draupadi as a play. Hence with great and almost uncanny force, the complex interface between theatrical performance and political action comes to the fore when we think about this strange time lag between theatrical performance and political reality.
When I interviewed Sabitri and Kanhailal Heisnam about the production of Draupadi in Imphal in March, 2011, I wanted to know their views on the connection between these two events. Their subsequent statements elucidated what seemed to be a strange, strictly non-empirical, reverberation between two discrete, yet significantly ‘historical’ moments in their milieu. Ima Sabitri said about the experience of her performance: “I had for all my life heard stories of women who had been raped. I had felt their pain. When I heard the story of Draupadi from Ojha6, it seemed like our story. In the rehearsals I felt I needed to release my whole spirit, my whole soul. It is a question of the soul. With clothes I feel it is not real. It is a trick. At that culmination, I am fully authentic when my body is bare. My energy is released, it vibrates. If I do not go through all of Druapadi’s pain myself every time I perform, my acting would not succeed.” And in the course of the long interview, Ojha Kanhailal said: “As far as I know, there is no direct connection. The imas7 who protested in 2004 did not have any relationship with the play. They probably don’t see plays. They are old, some of them not very educated. But that is not the point. Things just happen historically at a juncture. They have the spirit inside, the spirit of the times. There is no conscious connection. The spirit of the real life and the spirit we try to create through our theatre are synchronised. That is the point.”
The excerpts from the interviews, I would like to believe, speak for themselves. Kanhailal’s point about the zeitgeist seems an important one. What seems to pervade both narratives – the theatrical and the political- is the willingness, the ability and the felt necessity of engaging with pain as an embodied practice – pain as, in fact, an imperative to the process of bodily intervention in the public space as actor/protester. Both speak of activating a kind of energy, a body language, where the spirits of past pain – not technically the actor’s own8 – may be mobilised in the crisis of the present moment through a willing, renewed and ritual engagement with that pain. The question is not one of effective representation, a mere achievement of which (as Sabitri Heisnam felt) would be ‘a trick’, but on what Saba Mahmood calls “the affective and embodied practices through which a subject comes to relate to a particular sign – a relation founded not only on representation but also on what we can call attachment and cohabitation”9.
In Sabitri’s performance, a moment of surplus or rupture is created – where theatre and politics spill over into each other, allowing women’s political and performative voices to find intimate connections with each other. These voices then manage to escape (in protest and in performance, as well as in the spaces where the two overlap), in productive ways and even for short periods of time, the dictates of (sometimes claustrophobic) community or state-driven narratives. Draupadi, therefore, mirrored with a strangely proleptic voice the very body language that the imas chose when they brought themselves out on the streets to protest Thangjam Manorama’s death at the gates of Kangla in 2004. Though the event has been severally called the Ima’s (mothers’) protest, the women at Kangla were, for once, not protesting only on behalf of the Meitei community – as mothers, sisters, daughters or bread-winners of the family; they were protesting on behalf of their own violated bodies, a novel twist in the ‘resistance’ narrative which cannot perhaps be fully contained within the logic of Meitei community identity. Although there have been subsequent attempts, both by scholars10 and the people of Imphal (some of whom I spoke with at length during my visits to the city in 2009 and 2011) to reclaim the event at Kangla for the community and place it within a history of bravery of Meitei womanhood (especially the Nupi Lans11), there are serious ruptures within the seeming continuum. A moment of surplus (or escape) had been created and witnessed. It would not be easy for conventional narratives of either the state or the community to appropriate and subsume this political moment in its totality.
But the imas of Kangla were preceded by another hanubi who had stripped herself naked in protest on a Calcutta stage in 2001. She was performing, these women were not: or is it really that simple? What are the elements of theatrical spectacle operating in a public political event? What is the political potency, if any, of a purely theatrical event? Perhaps we can here begin to map a tentative syntax for examining how ideas of ‘what is political’ travel from and between these seemingly separate zones of theatrical politics and political theatre.
Trina Nileena Banerjee teaches at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata and can be reached at trina.banerjee@gmail.com.
Notes
1Trina Nileena Banerjee, “Kanhailal’s Draupadi: Resilience at the Edge of Reason,” in Theatre of the Earth: Clarifying the Trajectory by Kanhailal Heisnam. (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2016), pp. 153-165.
2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Draupadi by Mahasweta Devi” [Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 381-402] . The translation was reprinted in Writing and Sexual Difference [Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1982].
3 Deepti Misri, “Are You A Man?” [Signs, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 603-625].
4 Deepti Misri, “Are You a Man?” and Namrata Gaikwad, “Revolting Bodies, Hysterical State: Women Protesting the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958)”, [Contemporary South Asia, Volume 17, Number 3, September 2009 , pp. 299-311(13)].
5 ‘Women give vent to naked fury in front of 17 AR at Kangla’, July 5 2004 (Imphal), in The Sangai Express <http:// e-pao.net epRelatedNews.asp? heading=12&src=150704> [last accessed 14 October 2005].
6 The word ‘Ojha’ in Meitei means ‘teacher’ and this how Sabitri Heisnam usually refers to Kanhailal Heisnam.
7 The word “ima” in Meitei means “mother”.
8 “We are Manorama’s mothers!”, the imas have been recorded as stating. [Cited in Misri, “Are You a Man?”, pp. 614].
9 Saba Mahmood , “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1 January 2009): 836-862.
10 Walter Fernandes, “Limits of Law and Order Approach to the North East”[Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 39, No. 42 (Oct. 16-22, 2004), pp. 4609-4611].
11 The history of the two ‘Women’s Wars’ or Nupi Lan in colonial times is associated almost entirely with the women’s market. These wars were waged, on both occasions, against the policies and orders of the colonial administration. The first Nupi Lan took place in 1904 when the residence of the British Political Agent Major Maxwell was burnt down by unknown persons and Maxwell ordered a supply of free labour from the Meitei people in order to rebuild the house. Women gathered in thousands and protested against the orders of the government until it was finally withdrawn. There was a similar organised protest by women in 1925 against the imposition of a water tax by the British Government. The next major Nupi Lan took place in 1939 (when Manipur was almost facing a famine) against the official policy on the unlimited export of rice from the valley by Marwari traders. [See Soyam Lokendrajit, ‘An Artist’s Response to Contemporary Reality: A Case of Two Directors’ in Seagull Theatre Quarterly: Theatre in Manipur Today, (Calcutta: The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, June-Sept, 1997), p. 26 and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar, Feminism in a Traditional Society: Women of the Manipur Valley, (New Delhi: Shakti Books, 1984), pp. 34-37.]