MITRO MARJANI Play Review

Ank's new play MITRO MARJANI, which opened at the NCPA's Ananda festival of Hindi plays, is interesting for its subject but disappoints in its treatment. Based on Krishna Sobti's eponymous novel, the play depicts an unlikely heroine in a traditional and rural Punjabi household. Mitro with her unbridled sexuality and free tongue challenges and ruthlessly teases the conventions and mores of her conservative Punjabi family.



Regional Indian women writers of fiction have been incredibly revealing in their depictions of their women characters, and the Sahitya Akademi award-winning writer, Krishna Sobti, is clearly one of them. Her flirtatious, free-spirited heroine is unafraid and unapologetic. The sexual innuendoes and the expletives she uses are not repelling but suggest a woman frustrated and stifled by her environment.

Hearing Mitro it almost seems that she is an anachronism in the household she has wed into. Sobti's scandalous Mitro is a bait to provoke us into accepting an uncharacteristic Indian heroine so that we might get a glimpse of her pure conscience and her suppressed potential.

Ank's staging of this controversial novel comes as a pleasant surprise. However the bare staging, directed by Devendra Raj Ankur, and relying on the prowess of its cast (a competent team of actors including Satyajit Sharma and Aman Gupta, another Ank veteran), and its leading actress Preeta Mathur Thakur who plays Mitro, is tame. There is only a hint at the audacity that leaps from the novel's pages.

Mathur is one of our best actresses; through hundreds of shows that she has done with Ank, she does not seem to age. Her infection for the stage is charming and it is her enthusiasm that keeps her going. At the end of the show, she recalled Dinesh Thakur, Ank's charismatic founder, who passed away last year. She said that he had always been keen to stage this novel.

The Punjabi in the play may pose a problem for those who do not follow the language but that's the least of considerations for a story whose heroine is undermined, quite ironically by the adopted prudishness of her stage avatar.

*Deepa Punjani is the Editor of this website.