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All about Ajoka
By
Faryal Shahzad In commemoration of its silver jubilee, Ajoka organised a week-long theatre festival titled Musafat in Lahore. The festival spanned most of its popular performances such as Hotel Mohenjodaro, Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban, Bala King, Dushman, Shehr-i-Afsoos, Chaak Chakkar and Bullah. — Dawn Ajoka’s 25 years of journey as socially-oriented theatre is a crusade of multiple causes. In a society where meaningful entertainment with a purpose meets few protagonists, Ajoka has managed to brave the odds, carrying forth the torch of social enlightenment and awareness with vigour and commitment. Evolving during this quarter of a century, Ajoka has been acutely aware of its role as a socially-committed cultural group. As for Ajoka’s affinity with political issues, it treats every political story as having strong social outfalls, and it is this connection that has led the theatre group to the forefront of socio-political developments. From fundamentalist military rules to quasi-military regimes to sectarianism, terrorism, religious extremism and to the bigotry of our society, it has focused on every one of these and many more issues through its plays and performances. Struggling for a secular, democratic, just, humane and egalitarian Pakistan for the last so many years, Ajoka has been able to survive the local climate of hostility and apathy towards performing arts with a cause. Set up by a small group of cultural activists during General Ziaul Haq’s repressive regime, it has kept up its struggle, despite the fact that our governments have been suppressing socially meaningful art, especially one that points a finger at their own doings. Some of Ajoka’s plays, however, have met with strong criticism, even from members of civil society, for going overboard in their rebuke of issues related with the religion. Burqavaganza and Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban were among those plays that were banned not only officially, but also received a lot of disapproval from some quarters of the civil society whose members argued that though, they were thematically apt, the hyperbolic depiction of some elements in them would mislead audiences, especially those outside the Muslim world. In commemoration of its silver jubilee, Ajoka recently organised a week-long theatre festival titled Musafat in Lahore, also to be performed in Karachi from May 30 to June 4. The festival spanned most of Ajoka’s popular performances such as Hotel Mohenjodaro, Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban, Bala King, Dushman, Shehr-i-Afsoos, Chaak Chakkar and Bullah being among the performances. Dedicated to the victims of terrorism, Hotel Mohenjodaro is an adaptation of a play written by Ghulam Abbas in 1968. The story is an account of a TV reporter from a troubled tribal area with scenes from a devastating suicide bombing incident. The retrogressive and intolerant ideology of religious fundamentalists propagating an orthodox rigid interpretation, the acquiescence of the establishment and the disastrous consequences of following the logic of a theocratic state, all evident in our society now were scribed by the writer so many years ago and has been well-adapted by Shahid Nadeem. The total takeover by the turban-brigades of the story doesn’t seem unimaginable anymore, especially in view of the imminent threat of Talibanisation. ‘Talibanisation is not about the physical presence of the Taliban,’ said Madeeha Gauhar at the opening of the Musafat festival. ‘Talibanisation is, in fact, about the skewed and bigoted mindset that such trends inculcate in their victims; a frame of mind that talibanises instead of thinking.’ Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban was first performed in 1992, and highlights the injustices and atrocities committed under the cover of the Blasphemy Laws or what the performance refers to as the ‘black laws’. The play shows how the rights of minorities are trampled, and how the clerics use these laws and misinterpreted versions of religious doctrines to target minorities, while governments use media headlines of blasphemous acts by non-Muslims to divert attention of the nation from pressing issues of rising crime, insecurity, inflation, and joblessness, etc. The media is also so obsessed with political and economic issues in the country that it never pays heed to the atrocities committed against minorities. Bala King, an adaptation of Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui was first performed in 1998 to mark the 100th birthday of Brecht. Bala King is an unemployed pehlwan gang leader who exploits the vulnerability of road transport gangs. He uses his muscle power to bribe and blackmail businessmen and shopkeepers to accept his authority and protection. The rise of Bala King and people’s inability in resisting his dictatorial advances shows the susceptibility of poor and illiterate members of the society against such self-proclaimed kings. Shehr-i-Afsoos is an experimental production based on Intizar Hussein’s play. The writer seeks to expose the nightmarish world of three scepters who have lived through the tumultuous times of 1947 and 1971. Surreal figures trapped in a swamp of guilt and condemnation, the characters seek escape from memories that haunt them, but there seems to be no salvation as they plunge deeper into despair in the city of sorrows. Based on another one of Brecht’s masterpieces and first performed in 1985, Chaak Chakkar depicts events that had a very strong relevance to the military regime of the ‘80s and those that followed later. Brecht uses a popular Chinese legend to pose the question of social ownership to the audiences. The unending cycle of corruption, treachery, dirty politics, mockery of justice, and the collapse of moral and political fabric have all been well-depicted in the play. The Chakkar spirals into a vicious circle, where corrupt rulers provoke anger and rebellion in the society, hence, bringing into power another set of rulers, who is no better than their predecessors, and hence, meet the same fate, while the fate of the nation remains as bleak.
Ajoka staged its first play in May 1983 in Karachi in
defiance of the strict censorship laws, and was an adoption of Badal
Sircar’s Jaloos, a play that aimed at exposing the connivance of the
ruling military-civilian elite and its imperialist masters who have
always tried to hoodwink the public. It has now over two dozen
original plays and several adaptations in its repertoire, and has
collaborated with theatre activists from India and Bangladesh, even
in times when any form of communication across the border was
treated as treason. DAWN Entertainment :Sunday, 31 May, 2009 |
