Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing

Ghoom, Darjeeling, is almost 2.5 km above sea level. Standing in the rarified air of Ghoom, you can watch the Kanchenjunga turn gold as it gets drenched in the rays of the rising sun. The phenomenon lasts for a short duration. The white pristine peak again returns to its original colour blending and disappearing among the white cirrus clouds that flit in the sky. Over time, it’s shrouded by mists that hang over this region. The event is transitory and repeats itself on every clear morning like life that flits in and out of existence over and over again…

Witnessing this phenomenon feels like a privilege of a lifetime as is meeting people who shine brightly and unusually, like the Kanchenjunga, to disappear into mists all too early. One such person was the founder of pandies’ ¹ who coordinated the pandies’ corner for Borderless Journal, the late Sanjay Kumar (1961-2025). The idea of starting this column was to bring out the unheard voices of those who had risen above victimhood to find new lives through the work done by pandies’. In his book, Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, he described his scope of work which in itself was stunning. His work ranged from teaching to using theatre and play to heal railway platform kids, youngsters in Kashmir, the Nithari survivors and more — all youngsters who transcended the scars seared on them by violations and violence. We hope to continue the column in coordination with pandies’.

Another very renowned person whose art encompassed a large number of social concerns and is now lost to time was the artist, MF Husain (1915-2011). This issue of Borderless is privileged to carry an artwork by him that has till now not been open to the public for viewing. It was a gift from him to the gallerist, Dolly Narang, on her birthday. She has written nostlgically of her encounters with the maestro who walked bare-feet and loved rusticity. She has generously shared a photograph of the sketch (1990) signed ‘McBull’ — a humorous play on his first name, Maqbool, by the artist.

Drenched with nostalgia is also Professor Fakrul Alam’s essay, dwelling on more serious issues while describing with a lightness his own childhood experiences. Many of the nonfiction in this issue have a sense of nostalgia. Mohul Bhowmick recalls his travels to Bhutan. And Prithvijeet Sinha introduces as to a grand monument of Lucknow, Bara Imambara. Lokenath Roy takes us for a stroll to Juhu, dwelling on the less affluent side. Suzanne Kamata describes her source of inspiration for a few stories in her new book, River of Dolls and Other Stories. A darker hue is brought in by Aparna Vats as she discusses female infanticide. But a light sprays across the pages as Devraj Singh Kalsi describes how his feisty grandmother tackled armed robbers in her home. And an ironic tone rings out in the rather whimsical musing by Farouk Gulsara on New Year days and calendars.

With a touch of whimsy, Ratnottama Sengupta has also written of the art that is often seen in calendars and diaries as well as a musing on birthdays, her own and that of a friend, Joy Bimal Roy. They have also conversed on his new book, Ramblings of a Bandra Boy, whose excerpt is also lodged in our pages, recalling their days in the glitzy world of Bollywood as children of notable film director, Bimal Roy (1909-1966), and award-winning writer, Nabendu Ghosh (1917-2007).

We feature the more serious theme of climate change in our other interview with Bhaskar Parichha, who has written a book called Cyclones in Asia: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience. He has spoken extensively on resilience and how the incidence of such storms are on the rise. We carry an excerpt from his non-fiction too. His book bears the imprint of his own experience of helping during such storms and extensive research.

Climate change has been echoed in poetry by Gazala Khan and the metaphor of thrashing stormy climate can be found in Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal’s poetry. Touching lines on working men spread across the globe with poems from Michael Burch, Shamik Banerjee, Stuart McFarlane and Ashok Suri while Ryan Quinn Flanagan has written of accepting change as Nazrul had done more than eighty years ago:

Everyone was at each other's throats,
insistent that the world was ending.
But I felt differently, as though I were just beginning,
or just beginning again…

--Changes by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Poets, like visionaries across time and cultures, often see hope where others see despair. And humour always has that hum of hope. In a lighter tone, Rhys Hughes makes one laugh or just wonder as he writes:

I once knew a waiter
who jumped in alarm
when I somersaulted across
his restaurant floor
after entering the front door
on my way to my favourite
table: he wasn’t able
to control his nerves
and the meal he was bearing
ended up on the ceiling
with people staring
as it started to drip down.

--No Hard Feelings by Rhys Hughes

We have many more colours of poetry from John Drudge, Cal Freeman, Phil Wood, Thompson Emate, George Freek, Srijani Dutta, Akbar Fida Onoto, and others.

Translations feature poetry. Lyrics of Nazrul (1899-1976) and Tagore (1861-1941) appear together in Professor Alam’s translations of their love songs from Bengali. He has also transcreated a Bengali poem by Jibananada Das (1899-1854). Profoundly philosophical lines by Atta Shad (1939-1997) in Balochi has been rendered to English by Fazal Baloch for his birth anniversary this month. Ihlwah Choi has translated his poem from Korean, taking up the poignant theme of transience of life. A Tagore poem called ‘Kheya (Ferry)’, inspired by his rustic and beautiful surroundings, has been brought to us in English.

Our fiction this month features human bonding from across oceans by Paul Mirabile, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao and Snigdha Agrawal. This theme of love and bonding is taken up in a more complex way by our reviews’ section with Meenakshi Malhotra writing of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s novel, Shabnam, translated from Bengali by Nazes Afroz. Bhaskar Parichha has explored the past by bringing to focus Abhay K’s Nalanda: How it Changed the World. Somdatta Mandal’s review of Amitav Ghosh’s latest Wild Fiction: Essays touches upon various issues including climate change.

Huge thanks to all our contributors, the Borderless team for all these fabulous pieces. Thanks to Gulsara, Kamata, Bhowmick and Sinha for the fabulous photography by them to accompany their writings. Heartfelt gratitude to Sohana Manzoor for her cover art and to Dutta for her artwork accompanying her poem. Without all your efforts, this issue would have been incomplete. And now, dear readers, thank you for being with us through this journey. I turn the issue over to all of you… there is more as usual than mentioned here. Do pause by our contents page.

Let’s celebrate life this spring!

Happy Reading!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

pandies’ was started in 1987. It’s spelled with a small ‘p’ and the name was picked by the original team. Read more about pandies’ by clicking here. ↩︎

Click here to access the contents page for the February 2025 Issue

READ THE LATEST UPDATES ON THE FIRST BORDERLESS ANTHOLOGY, MONALISA NO LONGER SMILES, BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK.

Title: Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play

Author: Sanjay Kumar

Publisher: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing

A SUMMING UP / AN OPENING OUT

The ludic journey has taken us playing through performing, studying, researching, teaching, and writing theatre. It is a specific, experience-based journey, but it has a vastness and a depth that is just about beginning to reveal itself. The one thing that is clear is that creating theatre is an exercise in seeking an alternate way of life, constantly activist and constantly developmental.

Challenging the hegemonic crust, showing it to be the veneer that it is, theatre is the voice of all the diversity that lies beneath. Inimical to the state, in its purer, stronger, manifestations it questions all forms of authority, and beyond that, exposes the fallacies that constitute the very framing of authority. It is the reply to authoritarianism, and at best, often the only means to express the perspective of the unheard. It leads from the front against oppression and repression and becomes a vehicle for the two rudimentary rights of all thinking beings, the right to say ‘no’ and the right to question ‘why’. Hated by religious bigots, theatre is against the orthodox and the patriarchal, and also against the ossification of the radical, showing progress to be a verb in progress rather than an arrived noun. It is a performance that constantly seeks to outperform the deals dealt out to it.

A form existing as text, theory, and praxis from times immemorial, theatre integrally ties in with the histories of its times. Wallowing in many such oxymorons, theatre is historical in being located in its specific history and has a trans-historical dimension in being the perennial naysayer. And as the world sinks to newer levels of fascist authoritarianism, and detentions, arrests and persecutions abound, theatre reverts to metonymies, fantasies, dystopias and historical allegories to keep the fight going. All kinds of decadence are its target, from the toxic masculine to the religious bigot to capitalist power, theatre can, and does, oppose them all. Its biggest enemy remains the fascist, authoritarian, capitalist state in all its avatars, and it is possibly the best weapon against it.

The provisional aspect of its outcomes makes it capable of dealing with the ossified layers of its world and seeking alternate questions and meanings, continuing to show that the meanings that are rooted in hegemonic formations erode in time. An incomplete and malleable form, its multilayerity gives it the flexibility to explore diverse facets of the same reality.

The capitalist and the fascist seek to keep us entrapped in cocoons. Theatre, however, links people, it is a reaching out, and its transboundary aspect makes it possible for it to acquire an international dimension and combat the internationalism of the market. The history of theatre evidences its relative insularity to the forces of capitalism. After a capitalist takeover of our world, clearly since the 19th century in the west, and then in India, all over the world there exist traditions of theatre that prioritize working in the margins, and acquire a razor edge in showing the political through the prism of the peripheral. Critiquing the money-oriented world is where realism began, and the kind of distancing that left-wing theatre creates from this orientation takes the critique much further.

In our world, proscenium theatre can serve as a point of intersection between dominant processes and dominant policy making on the one hand, and the needs of the margins on the other. The pandies’ experience shows this across the class and gender divides, and in undermining notions of dominance and supremacism. Its strength lies in creating mutually performative playful zones where the audience goes along with the performing unit and sees through its own blindness to realize how easy it is to pass a lie as truth and vice versa. The creation of a developmental zone of shared ideology between the unit and the audience is the key to successful proscenium theatre. The challenge of theatre becomes to outperform and reach out to the class and power other. In its taking on of hegemony, it has the potential to be confrontationist. The challenge to regression can be outright or with subterfuge, as seen in the use of Manto by pandies’. Negotiating with those in power, the proscenium is also the space to impact the young privileged, to impact enough to use better, more inclusive paths, enabling us to make better decisions for the future. It is the perfect site for advocacy — social, medical, and even legislative. Its effectivity gains manifold if the performing unit makes a conscious effort to overcome, or at least mitigate, the class barrier, to get underprivileged voices in. This enables the margins to better penetrate hegemonic structures and provide leads to better courses of development.

With workshop-based theatre, we move into a zone that is probably most conducive to alternate formulations of amelioration and development. It opens the doors between the mainstream and its margins and enables those stories to come in, and it’s no longer a diseased margin that needs cure but a vital, throbbing entity with its own claims to be heard and developed on its own terms. This is the real site of out-performing, setting the problems and getting possible processes for solutions. The age-old problem is reframed in bold frieze – can those sitting in positions of power redress the problems of the disempowered? Can they even identify the problems holistically? On the margins, it gives the space to voice its position about its problems and judge back the power structures that profile it. One needs to give in to alterity, to at least a feeling that some of our fundamentally held beliefs can be wrong, or at the very least not pertaining to those away from the mainstream.

When we look at the workshops with the youth in Nithari, and with the platform boys, the certitudes of dominant classes get irrevocably displaced. The participants perform in all senses of the verb. And via proscenium theatre, these voices penetrate the mainstream. They raise new questions and review old problems. Co-ordinates of family, religion, and a good life do not hold any certitude for those in the margins. It stands bare that the system’s ameliorative processes are for the dominant only, and those in the margins continue to be used and exploited. And there is the special relationship between the facilitator and the participants that forms the core of understanding needs and moving towards possible methodologies of development.

Theatre assumes penetrative insights as one creates with communities in zones of conflict and war. Its potential in zones of war, not simply of usual peace processes but of understanding the conflict and seeking solutions from the engaged parties together is still untapped, as shown by the Kashmir experiences. The pioneer process showed possibilities in theatre, at par with workshopping at Nithari and with platform children. In zones of war, its characteristics become stronger and more capable, the defiance of an authoritative perspective, of not taking of one discourse as the final statement, the fluidity of negotiating binaries becomes a mode of understanding and bringing opposite positions closer. Again, voices that are totally removed in times of war, those of women and children, come to the fore and add perspectives to what is felt, and what is required. The process of theatre repeatedly showed that beneath the veneer of hegemonic dominant voices the suppressed voices wanted a cessation, of war, of conflict, of misery, of one and all. The incompleteness of theatre matches the incompleteness of the process, the bumps, the changes, the veering possibilities. Penetrating the chest-thumping veneer, it seeks out the vulnerability and takes us often, as elsewhere, into desire and imagination, the two sources capable of taking on most conflicts. Suspicion and hatred slowly give way to older traditions of love and togetherness. And there is potential for turning any, even loose, agenda on its head, as the workshop with the Sopore pelters showed. There is a kind of immediacy to the process. The form dips so much into the participants’ collective thought process and depends so much on what emerges from there, that it is this collectivity that at that moment forms the narrative.

All political formations seek to prescribe or proscribe theatre, and theatre exists in subversion, subterfuge, and open rebellion. Closer to our understanding of historical processes, theatre’s role has been more caustic as nations veer towards a right-swinging, fascist combination of patriarchy, religion, and capitalism, theatre has had to bite in hard. The proscenium theatre has played, and continues to play, its vital role, but it’s really theatre that emanates from various communities and underserved social formations that the more disturbing and relevant modes of theatre emerge. Arousing our critical faculties theatre goes places. The whole holistic mythos of the bourgeois success narrative from school to profession; the bigotry of all religions; legal, medical and social interventions — all are under its purview. And creating unique developmental zones in our societies it nudges to outperform ourselves, look beyond the decadent ideological frames of the worlds we inhabit, and seek out, or rather make, newer, better worlds.

About the Book:

Drawing on the writer’s experience of three and a half decades of performing, teaching and writing theatre, this book explores the performance practice of a theatre group (pandies’ theatre, Delhi) by placing this practice in a frame of international activist theatre movements. The teaching aspect provides a historical backdrop and the writing of plays adds depth and sharpens the political position. It identifies theatre as a force for changing society across the centuries and beyond national borders. The book examines a large variety of theatrical experiences, including well-known forms of proscenium, workshop and street theatre.

About the Author:

Sanjay Kumar has been part of the International Residency Programme at the Rockefeller Centre, Bellagio, Italy and an alum of the prestigious, US Government’s IVLP (International Visitors Leadership Program) and is the recipient of Delhi University’s (Vice Chancellor’s) Distinguished Teacher Award in 2009.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

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