India’s Progressive Street Theatre group JANAM on UK tour to mark 100 years of Ghadar Party
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Friends and Comrades
India’s Progressive Street Theatre group Jana Natya Manch (also called JANAM) is on UK tour these days to mark the centenary celebrations of the Ghadar Party, the centenary celebration of P. Sunderaya and contemporary socio economic issues.
Many of you knows that Janam was formed by, a famous artist, journalist and progressive activist Safdar Hashmi in 1973. Safdar Hashmi was nephew of prominent Pakistani Marxist Comrade Anis Hashmi. Safdar visited Pakistan in 1984 and we arranged meetings in different cities of Pakistan.
The Jana Natya Manch (The People’s Theatre Group) is India’s foremost political theatre group. Also known as JANAM (meaning “birth”), this group of self-trained actors has produced over 100 street and proscenium plays and has staged at least 8,500 performances in about 140 cities in India. Since its inception in 1973, the group has worked ceaselessly to educate its public, to promote political reform, and to lobby for the protection of the rights of India’s underprivileged. Subjects addressed in JANAM’s vast corpus of plays include women’s rights, labour and globalization, illiteracy, and religious fundamentalism.
Janam was founded in 1973 by a group of Delhi’s left-wing theatre amateurs, who sought to take theatre to the people. It was inspired by the spirit of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). Its early plays, though initially designed for the proscenium, were performed on makeshift stages and chaupals in the big and small towns and villages of North India. It also experimented with street skits.
Janam’s street theatre journey began in October 1978. The first play Machine with lyrical, stylized dialogues depicted the exploitation of industrial labour. Janam has played a significant role in popularizing street theatre as a form of voicing anger and public opinion. It has done plays on price rise, elections, communalism, economic policy, unemployment, trade union rights, globalization, women’s rights, education system, etc. Some of its best-known street plays are Hatyare, Samrath ko Nahi Dosh Gosain, Aurat, Raja ka Baja, Apaharan Bhaichare Ka, Halla Bol, Mat Banto Insaan Ko, Sangharsh Karenge Jitenge, Andhera Aaftaab Mangega, Jinhe Yakeen Nahin Tha, Aartanaad, Rahul Boxer, Nahin Qabul, Voh Bol Uthi and Yeh Dil Mange More Guruji.
This form of theatre has become a vital cultural tool for workers, revolutionaries and social activists. Street theater addresses topical events and social phenomenon and takes them straight to peoples’ places of work and residence.
Every year, Janam and CITU jointly organise an event to commemorate Hashmi’s martyrdom at Jhandapur, at the same place where the 1989 attack had taken place.
On 1 January 1989, while performing a street play, Halla Bol (Attack!), during Ghaziabad municipal elections, at Sahibabad’s Jhandapur village, (near Delhi), the Janam troupe was attacked by political hoodlums of Indian National Congress Party.[11] Safdar succumbed to his injuries the following day. On January 4, 1989, two days after his death, his wife Moloyshree Hashmi, went to the same spot again, with the troupe of ‘Jan Natya Manch’ and defiantly completed the play.
Fourteen years after the incident, a Ghaziabad court convicted ten people, including Congress Party member Mukesh Sharma, for the murder.
Please give your full support for this noble cause.
Best regards
Pervez Fateh
Coordinator – South Asian Peoples Forum UK
http://www.sapf-uk.org/ http://www.sapfonline.org/
Cell: +44 (0)795 854 1672
E-mail: pervezf@yahoo.com