The word Baawla, usually uttered with a mixture of affection and hopelessness, is the perfect way to describe a misfit, slightly crazy or lost soul. It can also be used to describe someone who is fundamentally unschooled in the ways of the world and is usually therefore a failure in the eyes of the world.
Raghav Dutt, the young writer-director who makes his debut with this play, extends these meanings to depict the difficulties that nine year old Raghu (Gaurav Aggarwal) faces when his mother leaves her abusive spouse to marry a better man who belongs to another community. This is a clear-eyed and lyrically realised production which traces the many ways in which a child is vulnerable to things that others say and do. Insensitive and brutal experiences are thrust on him by those who live in a world of smug certitudes. Various scenes depict street and neighbourhood politics with packs of children showing their capacity for cruelty. There is an underlying political subtext to the play which mirrors the ongoing conflicts between different groups and communities.
Caught in the midst of these fights, Raghu begins to feel marginalised. This feeling worsens when he finds that his mother and her new husband are re-building their world and discovering happiness. In a delicately handled scene he spies on a romantic moment involving his mother and his new father. He realises that he has become extraneous to their happiness and flees home to find refuge with a potter who lives in another mohalla. Here, he learns from the unworldly potter who is fond of Sufi poetry that birds are not meant to be kept in cages. Through poetry and parable the child learns to listen. One particular story strikes a chord. When difficult times come, says the potter, trees urge the birds who gather to them to fly away, believing in their safe return when things get better.
When Raghu is found again by his family after a few days, he has had a transformation. With the potter's words still resonating in his heart he greets his mother again but this time with a fragile and new understanding of the world he lives in. The play closes with these moving lines from a poem, "Abhi main ghoomne gaya hu lambi sair par, laut kar wahin aaunga apne ped pe."
The entire play is peppered with poems that speak of the special state of childhood in one way or another. The poetic tone is maintained through the staging with a well-judged instinct for combining the external reality with the personal and the intimate. One of the most attractive things about the play is the autobiographical strain which gives its characters a subtle veracity. We empathise with the incidents taking place in a type of small town context familiar to readers of Hindi literature of the last several decades where shades of the village, kasbah, mofussil town and mohalla meet. The easy cadences and rhythm of the language make us receptive to the narrative, setting our imaginations free and allowing us to inhabit the world of its characters.
This feeling extends from the opening moments of the play when the actress who plays the mother (Gouri Dutt) walks on to a stage with magical dappled lights to perform a poem. She touches on familiar events from everyday life ending each line with the refrain, "kya tum dekh sakte ho". As she moves softly on stage she appeals to the wide-eyed wonder of a child's mind. Her lines mix up the poetic with the mundane as she speaks of the night slipping in on a scooter. She also brings in the indicator, silencer and smoke from the scooter into the arc of her poem and performance, invoking the shades of a hometown and its remembered warmth. The poetic content in the rest of the play is reinforced when a character, unrelated to the main action of the play, strolls in at critical junctures to read poetry. A poem on childhood reads, "bus ladi sawaal ki jalti hai, dhua bawalo ka uthta hai..."
To invoke the era of TV series like Shaktimaan and television's ability to cannibalise attention so completely that the streets of a small town can achieve a perfect stillness, here is another poem..."jab tv chalta hai aur kuch nahi chalta, aankho ki putli ruk jaati hai". Among the characters who give the play texture are the squabbling grandmothers, well performed by Trisha Kale and Trimala Adhikari, though at times their encounters tend to get slightly exaggerated.
But perhaps because this living intimate quality of the Hindi used in the play is also part of the experience of migration from a distant hometown to a big anonymous city like Mumbai, it comes with the inherent dangers of romanticising a particular past and place. Viewing BAAWLA as a contemporary Hindi play today, there is sometimes an apprehension of being locked into a landscape where time has not moved. The script occasionally gives us the disquieting feeling that the kind of primal innocence invoked in the narrative, might, in part, be a construct.
But despite these questions, BAAWLA's emotional pitch and truthfulness are never in doubt and it remains a story narrated with uncommon honesty. For a first production that is a fine achievement.
*Devina Dutt is a Mumbai based arts writer who writes regularly for The Hindu.
Caught in the midst of these fights, Raghu begins to feel marginalised. This feeling worsens when he finds that his mother and her new husband are re-building their world and discovering happiness. In a delicately handled scene he spies on a romantic moment involving his mother and his new father. He realises that he has become extraneous to their happiness and flees home to find refuge with a potter who lives in another mohalla. Here, he learns from the unworldly potter who is fond of Sufi poetry that birds are not meant to be kept in cages. Through poetry and parable the child learns to listen. One particular story strikes a chord. When difficult times come, says the potter, trees urge the birds who gather to them to fly away, believing in their safe return when things get better.
