Every spectator at Thrissur’s School of Drama waited to watch Kabui Keioiba (Tiger Man), a play portraying the unrest in Manipur. Ten minutes into the play, an old Malayalam film song was heard, breaking the barriers of language and culture, bringing everyone home. It was a farming song in the rhythm of sowing and reaping. The play continued, portraying the lives of people– people of a village anywhere in India who farm, make sieves from bamboo, and make things with clay. Suddenly, army men made an entry, with orders to ‘kill anyone suspicious’, and ‘everyone in sight.’ They killed sleeping women, under the shed of the country with two main pillars – Dr B R Ambedkar and Gandhiji.
The traumatised villagers were seen forced to move to relief camps, do work they don’t know – sell useless articles they don’t use or don’t get to use as a result of being placed at capitalism’s lowest margin. Later in the play, villagers hid in their homes when a Hindi-speaking ‘national politician’ advised them on peace. The goddesses of the land–Pantoibi and Tabaton–witness many phases of the struggle, and try to help. The play ended with an image of a brahmin priest, the army chief, and the politician replicating the ‘don’t see, don’t hear, don’t speak’ motif of the three monkeys, while the goddesses stood witness and a little girl holding a skull with dead bodies in the forefront.
The play’s director Heisnam Tomba, who hails from Manipur, has an enormous range of work in different fields of theatre – as a playwright, director, musician, actor and more. His parents Kanhailal and Sabitri, well-known theatre artists and activists from Manipur, introduced him to the world of art, and his practice has been lifelong. He has received several awards and recognitions such as the National Sanskriti Award, and has trained theatre students at some of the most prominent institutions in India.
“The folk story is a gift from our ancestors. It talks about the seven brothers who protect the little sister – the brothers symbolise the hills and the sister – the valley, and the tiger men trying to abduct the sister. Tiger men are the foreigners or the embodiment of the idea of ‘mine’ and in total the idea of social evils. I tried to bridge the gap between the folk and the contemporary, the ancestral realm to the modern man through this play,” says Heisnam.
The play is an attempt to experiment with the testimonies of suffering, performed unconventionally, with minimal dialogues and more action.
Elaborating on why he chose to stage the play, Heisnam says that in Manipur, religion, military, and politics are the evil trinity. Instead of trying to resolve the conflict, they come together to make it worse, he adds, stating that the global gun culture, a reminiscence of the colonial culture, which escalates the situation, is supported through external powers that gain from wars.
“This is almost like a civil war. Farmers are unable to farm and are hungry. Common people are living a life in which they are scared of death either by one of the militant groups or the Indian Army itself. How, when the government in power intends to capitalise on this division, will the state return to normalcy? We believe that the letter D stands for democracy but in our situation, it signifies dictatorship. We do believe that the Indian Constitution is an inclusive document, but, in a state where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is in place, what are the constitutional rights of ordinary people? Where is the law and the lawyers?” he asks.
Heisnam elaborates that his plays do not talk about intellectuals, but about ordinary people who are suffering, and who need a solution to return to normalcy. Ordinary people are the same everywhere, working hard for their survival, he observes.
“If the people of India do not realise that the nexus between religion, politics, and the military is working against them, not only in Manipur but everywhere in the country, which is supposedly the largest democracy in the world, this is going to happen. It is an impending disaster in all states if we don’t work together to eliminate this criminal nexus,” Heisnam says.
He further adds that theatre is only one of the media, and it is the message that bears importance – that we are one, and we must stand together for each other.
“Several solutions have been proposed by the civil rights bodies such as student organisations or organisations of mothers. But none of these solutions are being looked at as the state does not intend to solve this crisis but only to capitalise on it for votes and power,” he says.
Kabui Keioiba’s final scene, with an image of the guardian goddesses facing the ‘three wise monkeys’, aesthetically reminds us of our collective future, and what could transpire if we do not take care and action.
Another one of Heisnam Tomba’s plays, titled Relief Camp, will be staged at the Serendipity Art Festival from Dec 15 - 22 in Goa. Heisnam says that Relief Camp too focuses on Manipur and how the place once called the jewel of India is now akin to a concentration camp. “The play explores the relevance of art in crisis. It looks at how long people can endure such horrors, and what role theatre plays in such a situation,” Heisnam says.
Gargi Harithakam is a writer and a political activist, presently working as the president of Vanaja Collective. She has published two novels, 'Unwinding a Death Spiral' & 'The Land of Lamp Bearers' other than several articles and poetry in Malayalam.