The opening act at the NCPA Centrestage festival 2013 was the Chennai-based Karthik Kumar's staging of Shekinah Jacob's ALI J, fresh off a run at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. In this solo performance, Mr Kumar appropriates a Muslim persona (Ali) to narrate a saga of disaffection set in an India where the lot of Muslims is decidedly dire; a premise that is undeniably sound and lends itself readily to the kind of exploration attempted here. Ms Jacob and Mr Kumar single out the elements of a so-called Muslim socio-religious identity and weave them into the texture of a common man's tale primed as a potent parable for our times, with Ali positioned as a kind of universal Muslim, underlined by the indistinctive mask he wears as the play opens into a state prison where he has been incarcerated.
The mask is discarded, once a more personal narrative takes over, and the prison bars (aluminium pipes arranged around the arena of performance) attached to varying lengths of ropes become emblematic of his plight at every step of his continental journey (with a brief sojourn to London thrown in for good measure perhaps to appeal to the 'crossover' audiences the play may have expected at the Fringe). In the end, Mr Kumar announces the coming together of the play's various strands as he triumphantly clutches the ropes in a collective bunch, a visual metaphor in keeping with the play's unfortunate show-and-tell spiel. Certainly, this foisting of a false sense of order is jarring, when in reality nothing has fallen into place organically.
The tragedy of this piece is two-fold. Firstly, in his turn, Mr Kumar is akin to a well-meaning bull in a china shop. With its constant breaking of the fourth wall, ALI J plays out like a thinly disguised stand-up routine, perhaps mandating a performing style not quite given to subtlety, but after a point, the delivery simply exhausts us, and not because of the harrowing episodes that crop up with such alarming alacrity in Ali's life. Even so, the actor does sometimes come across, in all his naivete, as sufficiently endearing, as he draws out his character's man-child qualities with a companion flamboyance that harnesses the grammar of classic RomCom (including a Cary Grant moment inflected with Hamlet) as he attempts to wind his way in vain towards our collective oohs-and-aahs, all the while employing a dialect that is easy on his tongue. This would have been all very well, if the audience were poised only for an evening of light entertainment. ALI J displays a hold on these pop elements, but when seeking to bite off more than it can chew, the play comes royally unstuck.
More than the broad acting on display, the play's fatal imbalance lies in its simplistic world-view and its ill-considered politics. Stopping just short of wearing a skull-cap, Ali's Muslim identity is propped up by the triteness of manufactured moments that have all the exotic markers in place (if indeed, an Indian Muslim comes equipped with such trappings) and the lazy shorthand of less than nuanced India-baiting. In one moment, he breaks into a comic reverie over biryani; in another he recounts pitifully the tale of his doomed love for a Hindu girl, who is named Bharati, almost as if to underscore the play's 'self-othering'. The instances of comic-book discrimination that he encounters in his white-collar world (being spat in the face by his lover's father for instance) does a disservice to the real-life oppression of Muslims, that takes place in rather subtle (and therefore far more insidious) ways. The spectre of India's class distinctions is an important component of prevailing prejudices, but the play seeks to cast Indian Muslims as a monolithic minority. Is there really a unifying thread between the well-heeled London-returned Ali or an Indian Mohajir in Pakistan or a tourist in Britain chastised as a 'Paki' or indeed Jinnah, father of a nation of 'others'? The play uses elements from Indian history with the casual disregard of a name-dropping arriviste. The Partition of India, the 26/11 attacks, the riots in Gujarat, are all fair game. For his efforts, Ali ends up in a cell sandwiched between Ajmal Kasab and Babu Bajrangi in neighboring cells - very convenient for the purposes of high drama, however phony. Even the birth of radicalisation in Ali comes off as a Eureka-moment that would do a Karan Johar film proud.
For a contemporary narrative that fuses several of the above elements but still manages to create a searing and authentic delineation of the contemporary Muslim, one needs look no further than Hansal Mehta's film Shahid. On the other hand, much as it would like to coerce brownie points via the fine intentions that remain its only raison d'etre, ALI J remains disjointed and dissatisfying. Ultimately, Ali's privations come across as nothing more than the delusion of grandeur of an emotional fool who wears his victimhood with little semblance of a spine.
