Colours of Rajasthan

 
 
 
 

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Life is no more uncertain

I awoke with a horrific dream. I had been staying at Hotel Peacock at Hamamamamthota in south west Sri Lanka, six hours from Colombo, listening to the sound of wild waves throughout the night. I wondered how this hotel had survived the tsunami. The entire Hamananthota district had been swamped by the tsunami, and around 4,500 people lost their life. You can see the sea from the open terrace of the hotel which doubles up as the coffee shop, it is less than 50 metres from the sea. I dreamed of a flooding sea, roaring waves and the sound of screaming human beings.

The next day, I was shocked when my Sri Lankan activist-translator friend Mr Indica told me more than 60 hotel guest and staff lost their lives in the tsunami, others were rescued and shifted to safer hotels. Perhaps I was in the same room where one of them had spent his or her last minutes! I steeled my heart. Here are thousands of people who lost their families and are trying to rebuild their life on the same shore. I am here to listen to their stories and understand the inner strength of people in overcoming crises.

Ayisha is a 21-year-old mother of a two-and-half-year-old child, whom I met in Kirinda Godana village. I met her through the Ruthunu Rural Women’s Organization. Her husband has been suffering from eye cancer for the last five year. She looks healthy and pleasant and was feeding her baby. This organization works in southern Sri Lanka to improve the socio-economic conditions of the most vulnerable women and their families. She seems at ease with me and starts talking to me in Sinhalese. It happened on the flight as well. Does a Malayalee woman from India look like a Sri Lankan? I don’t know! I traveled for six hours into the interior of Sri Lanka, but the villages could have been those in Kerala. Sri Lanka is less populated and uses less land for housing; it looks like the Kerala of 15 years ago. They have no doubts about my identity and even the police at local travel security checkposts spoke to me in Sinhalese

Mr Indica translated Ayisha’s story. She got married when she was 17 to Premadasa Perera, who was in his 40s. He was a mediator to god and chanted for worshippers. Her grandmother found him for her. She is the third of four sisters. He is from Kaluthara and they kept moving after their marriage. She now lives in the deep interior, near a wildlife sanctuary. Most of the land around is wet, and over 100 families have settled here after the tsunami.

In the early days of their marriage, her husband worked in a stone quarry and earned over Rs 600 per day. Following an eye infection, he couldn’t work any more, and underwent three surgeries before the cancer was detected.

I asked her about the tsunami nightmare three years ago. She said, “My neighbours told me about the tsunami. They ask me to run, but my husband stayed back as he was unwell. I ran with the others, as I had someone very special to protect—I was pregnant. The sea came very close to our hut, but did not destroy it. I ran I don’t know how many kilometres. Finally a vehicle from the city came to rescue us. My hands were empty, but my stomach was full.”

Hambantota district consists of 12 divisional secretariat (DS) divisions and 592 Grama Niladhari (GN) divisions. Hambantota is one of the districts severely affected by the tsunami and one of the poorest. 16,994 families or about 78,968 people in it were affected by the tsunami, while 3,334 families were displaced and 3,067 deaths reported. 2,303 houses were destroyed and 1,744 houses partially damaged.

According to government statistics, 35% of its population is below the national poverty line. Its vulnerability was exaggerated by the tsunami, which devastated peoples’ livelihoods. The poverty of the women in Sri Lanka, in particular, has drastically increased in the last two decades and is linked to their unequal situation in the labour market and status within the family. In Hambantota, the unemployment rate for women is 40.5 per cent, as against 13.4 per cent for men. The economic prospects for women are poor compared to national figures.

Ayisha finds herself in a peculiar position after the tsunami. Because of ill health, her husband could not find work, so he used to beg at the Kirintha Temple, where a lot of tourists and locals came to pray. But after the tsunami affected the whole area, people simply deserted the place. From then onwards, he was totally dependent on the community. Since they were all in the same boat, they tried to avoid him. A lot of organizations worked for post-tsunami relief, rehabilitating those who had lost their family members, homes and livelihood. But by their criteria, Ayisha has not lost anything! But nobody would loan her anything any more, and the last days of pregnancy were spent in terrible and unimaginable poverty. Her husband used to cry day and night with fear for the future. Ayisha had no hope when the baby boy was born.

In Tissamaharama area, a lot of property was destroyed. There is a need for post tsunami development projects that specifically target women. The morale and self esteem of the women is very low, which has led to the neglect of their children and youth. Many have children and youth that they struggle to care for. There is a need to create livelihoods for women that generate enough income so that they are economically and personally empowered to care for themselves and their families.

The Ruhunu Rural Women’s Organization was founded in 1984 to help alleviate the problems faced by rural women in the villages of Dikkubure and Andupelene, near Ranne Town, Tangalle DS Division, and Hambantota District.

RRWO staff addresses other community problems such as access to water through their rain water harvesting program, health & hygiene and environmental problems through the kitchen improvement/efficiency programme and establishing home gardens and the provision of family latrines. RRWO now works in over 46 villages, has developed over 47 CBOs and has over 2,500 direct members.

With the help of Action Aid International Sri Lanka (AAISL), RRWO start working with the objective of Immediate Humanitarian Needs in the tsunami affected community, their psycho social care, livelihood support and also capacity building.

They decided to support Ayisha because their criteria are flexible. They supported her husband’s medical treatment. But life remains difficult. As she is attractive, it was unsafe for her to stay in a mud hut without doors. She cant forget the night she attacked by a masked man! He touched her leg and try to molest her. Her husband cried for help, but nobody came--the whole area was deserted after the tsunami. So RRWO built a proper house for her family. Ayisha knows her house costs Rs. 5.3 lakhs: she keeps an account book. “When we laid the foundation of the house, no one came. Earlier I had friends, but once I fell sick, most of them didn’t talk to me, perhaps they were worried I would ask them for a loan.” They are also scattered after the tsunami. In their village Kirinda Godana 60 people died and it is a flood prone area.

She is waiting for a good date to shift to the new house, where she won’t have to worry about any more floods and human attacks. She will feel much more secure. Her husband seems confident as well. Ayisha cannot sit idle; she wants to take her life beyond uncertainty.

Their house is in an area called “100 hundred houses”, a resettlement colony of tsunami affected people. Ayisha is now planning to sell plastic goods provided by RRWO in bi-weekly market at her colony. They have already given her a bicycle for transport. “My husband will transport them by bike and we will sell them together. I also want to learn to ride a bike so that I can transport the goods myself.”

Ms Nadika, activist from RRWO, says, “We have allocated Rs 5,000-7,000 as initial support for their livelihood. We think there is a market for plastic items but we try for try it for three months and see how it works.”

Ayisha is waiting for market day. Life is not that uncertain for her any more. She is looking forward to it.
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African Days

Guardians of the Deep set to rock WSSD
Seven actors, representing seven fishing nations, will highlight the fate of the ocean in a play staged specially for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg later this month. The play, Guardians of the Deep, was workshopped by the actors who come from fishing communities in countries such as Egypt, India, Brazil and Kenya. It takes the audience to the fishing communities with all its problems including drug use and domestic violence because of decline in the fishing resource. Sajitha Madathil from India lives with her husband in Kerela, in the south of India. She tells the story of the disappearance of the small fisherman because of the big fishing trawlers. She says the main issue in the story is the fishing trawlers. John Martin, a British director, says he hopes to put a human face to the issues that will be debated at the summit. He says:"I'd like the to go away and remember the face of Jody Abrahams."It is through the hands and feet, the music and the voices of this troupe that the message of small communities around the world will be heard in Johannesburg.

Matsyaganddhi-Calicut Performance

Making waves: ‘Matsyagandhi’ is about the travails of the fishing community.



Of marginalised lives

P.K. AJITH KUMAR

‘Matsyagandhi,’ a one-woman play scripted and directed by Sajitha, was staged in Kozhikode.
Carrying a lamp in her hands, she steps down from the stage. Her face, framed by her long, thick tresses, looks radiant. As she walks into the midst of the spectators inside a packed Town Hall in Kozhikode, and into darkness, she is applauded loudly.
It was a memorable homecoming for M. Sajitha who staged ‘Matsyagandhi,’ a one-woman play she has scripted and directed. She couldn’t have hoped for a better venue than her own hometown for the play’s premier in Kerala.
Fishing community
‘Matsyagandhi’ is about the fishing community; it is about how globalisation has impacted their lives. It is also about how they are marginalised by society and how they are often looked down upon because they smell of fish. The entire play is narrated by a fisherwoman who smells of fish (‘Matsyagandhi’). The play was first staged in South Africa, during the Earth Summit in 2002.
“It was also staged in three South African cities – Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria,” says Sajitha, who is working with the Sangeet Natak Akademi. She moved to Thiruvananthapuram from New Delhi recently.
“The play was well received in Delhi, even by the non-Malayali audience, when it was staged a couple of months ago. Theatre is very much alive in Delhi, unlike in Kerala,” she says.
‘Matsyagandhi,’ she says, is not just a play, but a documentation of the lives of fisherwomen as well. “The script is based on my conversations with them. I knew my play had reached out to them when I found a woman weeping at the end of my performance – the play wasn’t complete then and it wasn’t a proper staging as such – on the beach in Veli, Thiruvanthapuram. She was the sister of a fisherwoman who had been raped."
Sajitha says though she has used the bare minimum of props, she has worked hard on the background score.
“Umesh Sudhakar has composed the music and we recorded the real sound of the sea, not any synthetic sound.” And it has worked. Sajitha manages to capture the audience’s attention for about 45 minutes with her performance and the sound and the music.
She became interested in acting when she began to perform in the stage plays produced by Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad. “I found that I loved acting, though in my student days I was more into classical dances. Then I realised that the Parishad’s plays were not the kind of plays that I really wanted to act in. I went to Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata to learn acting academically.”
Given an option, she would have loved to devote all her time to theatre. “But you can’t make a living out of theatre, so you are forced to work, and that’s the case with all those involved in theatre in Kerala,” she says. Sajitha has acted in plays for different troupes. “Since I am not attached to any particular company, I do get interesting assignments from different troupes. I enjoyed acting as ‘Mother Courage’ in the Brecht play put on by Abhinaya, Thiruvananthapuram. I also acted in Om Cheri’s ‘Pralayam.’”
Sajitha is currently working on the script of a play based on a Malayali woman living in Delhi.
“It would most probably be another one-actor play, but I have to use a few other voices. So I might as well bring them on to the stage; I have not decided on that,” she says.

"The Deluge"

An engrossing Malayalam play staged here brought to life the Biblical tale of Noah's Ark, but with a twist .

"Pralayam" (The Deluge) was staged at the National School of Drama as part of a theatre festival by Jansanskriti, a socio-cultural organization active in the capital. It deftly uses the deluge to create a context for exposing the implicit violence, injustice and corruption in present-day society. The play, penned by noted writer Omchery N.N. Pillai, was first produced in Delhi 30 years ago. Yet its relevance has only increased with time as was observed by former president K.R. Narayanan, the chief guest at the performance.

The impact of a heavenly revelation to an antediluvian Noah that the world would end in seven days forms its theme.

In the play, a decrepit Noah who cannot even draw a cross by himself is asked to make an ark for saving 1,000 good people, including himself. He succeeds in building an ark in seven days.

Apart from Noah, there are two other main characters - Mrs. Noah, a worldly wise, avaricious and power hungry woman, and Miss Mary, a clear headed, sceptical young secretary of Noah who is more concerned with human beings than god.

Mrs. Noah manages to get in touch with the richest, most powerful people of the world who want to corner most of the seats on the ark. Returning home after building the ark, Noah is thoroughly disheartened. He goes back to the ark just before countdown to make a big leak at the bottom to ensure that all the occupants perish in the sea.

Samkutty Pattomkary, a versatile young theatre personality from Kerala, presented a riveting performance. K.P. Anil Kumar as Noah, M. Sajitha as Mrs Noah and S. Sreekala as Miss Mary rendered outstanding performances.

Unlike in the original play, where Christ appears only as an apparition, in this production he appeared several times bearing a man-sized cross. In the hands of Mrs Noah, the cross becomes a weapon, which is used to kill Miss Mary, the voice of reason. In the original play, Miss Mary is shot.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, torrential rainstorms and tsunami add to the frenzy.

A dummy television with a transparent screen is among the innovations used by Samkutty to bring alive the drama created by the media, which has come to dominate life and influence opinions, sometimes adversely, in the present times.

"The Deluge" highlights the increasing spread of corruption, crime and fear psychosis with the spread of satellite communication. It deals with fundamental questions of injustice, inequality and oppression effectively with a penchant for irony, humour and sarcasm.
The characters have deeper symbolic value, which gives the play a sense of timelessness.

Neelamperoor Padayani

. Neelamperoor Padayani in south Kerala, one of the rich endowments in cultural and artistic expression that India has, is a colourful and participatory celebration of life and faith. The most striking aspect of Neelamperoor Padayani is its participatory character. It is a mind boggling to see one whole village living in a State that is getting urbanized at a frenetic pace get together to celebrate a festival. Every child and adult in every family in Neelamperoor is part of the Padayani festivities, something amazing considering the kind of divisions that otherwise exist in modern political societies. The activities begin at a slow rhythm and move to a grand finale which is a cathartic experience for the entire village. Its links with nature is so close that It is as though every plant and every twig in the village is being nurtured for the Neelamperoor Padayani. The artistic constructions that make Neelamperoor Padayani a colourful experience are all made using leaves, twigs and colours made from the locality.
As a part of my official work I was there to document the whole process of padayani rituals and performance. It was amaszing to see how a villagers were using temple permisses for variety of performances,.its a flow of movements and rhythm, one ritual to another...entries and exsit...

Thuruthu (Islet)

53 minutes/Mini DV
Siby Jose Chalissery
Thuruthu examines the alienation of a lower middle
class woman in rural Kerala, who lives in a fiercely
patriarchal society and is stranded at the crossroads of
tradition and modernity.Moving between fact and
fantasy, reality and dream, present and past, the film
examines how Jessy's hopes of escape to a verdant
and idyllic islet (Thuruthu) are predestined to end in
disaster.

Problematising The Body-A Solo Performance

BEAUTY PARLOUR - Problematising The Body
C. S. Venkiteswaran



Beauty Parlour, a play by K S Sreenath, directed by Sreenath and Sajitha, was performed at Thiruvananthapuram as part of the Theatre Festival during the Surya Festival 2001 "Beauty parlour' , according to the playwright (K S Sreenath), was inspired by a newspaper item about a woman who turned violent in a beauty parlour, wounded herself, and ran out naked into the city streets; she was arrested by the police later, but she refused to talk to anyone; and no one came in search of her. The play is a solo performance by M Sajitha (who also co-directs the play along with Sreenath), which is rendered as the monologue of the beautician from whose parlour Anita runs out. As it unfolds the play delves into the life, struggles and conflicts of both the characters - the narrator (the beautician) and her customer (Anita), both turning out to be victims.
The central question the play addresses is woman's relation to her body - the perpetual dissatisfaction with one's body that impairs her relation to her self; the obsessive concerns about its appearance and 'beauty'; the yearning to achieve and maintain its elusive perfection -its youth, smoothness, freshness and desirability…When one's appearance determines one's self-image, identity and self, its despairing elusiveness becomes one's destiny. Never available to oneself, but always naked to the gaze, look and glance of the other, and from which one has no escape, the obsession with appearance is the most tragic of one's relation to oneself. The mannequin on the stage represents the dream that the culture imposes upon woman, that ideal of perpetual youth hood, firmness, shapeliness, and alluring glow. As the play progresses, it is dismembered limb by limb. And in the end, the parts of the mannequin lie strewn around the stage. In the process, the play dissects the ideal of beauty and appearance, that chimera Anita was in pursuit. So, the dismemberment of the mannequin is accompanied by the putting together of the bits and pieces of Anita's life - a life that was defined by and destined to be the object of male gaze, always subject to preening and pruning to satisfy male desire. The characters - the beautician herself and Anita - come to life in the brilliant performance of Sajitha. The tragedy of their lives unfolds before us in the words of the beautician, who, trying to drive her guilt away, compulsively reminisces about her erstwhile customer. The play employs an acting method that brings to mind pakarnnattam of our classical arts like koodiyattam - a technique that perfectly suits the theme of the play which is about woman's relation to her body and her self. In pakarnnattam the actress effortlessly assumes and transforms herself into different selves through bodily movements and abhinaya. In real life, her body is a prison for Anita, something which is forced to shapes and postures, and is beyond her control. This dialectic between form and content, that is founded upon the conflict between body and appearance, self and image, desire and desirability, the look and its target, what one is and what one wants to be, lends 'Beauty Parlour' a dramatic tension that is contemporary and political. The production of the play was also minimalist in essence. Using minimum facilities and entirely depending upon the magic of acting and the innovative use of stage properties, the play is also sparing in its use of light and music."Beauty Parlour", in its passionate search for a new language that is capable of expressing the conflicts of our times marks a qualitative shift in the history of Malayalam theatre. Breaking away from both streams of 'experimental' theatre in Kerala - one obsessed with form and the other with the 'message' - Sreenath's play gives statement to the churning process that the contemporary theatre activists are finding themselves in.venkitesh@eth.net

Mother Courage

A tale of survival amidst ruin

C. Gouridasan Nair

Abhinaya will stage `Mother Courage and Her Children' today.

The ruinous visage of war is a familiar image in the present times. Pictures of wailing women, blood-spattered homes and dead bodies on desolate pavements are too familiar to be forgotten easily these days. Wars, big and small, also have their beneficiaries, people who are driven by greed and profit-motive. A situation captured in all its complexity by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in his play `Mother Courage and Her Children.'

Brecht's play would go once again on stage at the Gorky Bhavan in Thiruvananthapuram on May 20.

Being produced by Abhinaya, the most active amateur theatre group in Thiruvananthapuram, under a scheme of the Department of Culture, Union Ministry of Human Resources Development, the play is being directed by a young alumnus of the National School of Drama, S. Thaninleima, from Manipur.

The cast is from Abhinaya, with the sole exception of M. Sajitha, herself a well-known actress, theatre director and researcher, currently based in New Delhi. Sajitha is doing the lead role of Mother Courage, a woman trapped in a system driven by greed and self-interest, who survives the war at the cost of her children. The cast also includes Sreenivasan, Jaimon, Siby Jose, Murugan, Nidhi, Vishnupriya, Siji, Kannanunni and Manu.

The Hindu-20th May 2005

Matsyaganddhi

The play Matsyaganddhi a solo performance of SajithaM , directed and scripted by her is going to be presented at Calicut Town Hall on 8th June. All are Welcome!

Duration-50min

Language-Malayalam

Music- Umesh Sudhakar

Light-Sreekanth

On Stage-Sajitha

Why This Play

The play Matsyaganddhi relates directly to thesustainability in fishing community and the role ofthis life sustaining industry in small costal communities around the world. The script of this playdeveloped through the interaction with fishingcommunity at Kerala costal area. It narrates how theimpact of globalization became a strong reason forloosing their deep knowledge on sea and crushedlivelihood of fisher folks. Matsyaganddhi reveals the pic ture of a marginalized society changing their selfunder the compulsion of the mainstream. Apart fromcaste related anomalies they had to face occupationrelated discrimination. The question of fish stinking is specter for the mainstream society whose obsessionwith a fragrant body odor keeps the fisherwomen always as a problematic one. The mainstream culturalartifacts like cinema, novel and other popular artform has represented fisherwomen as sex starred womanseeking always the attention of the visible man, thisimage of women as vulnerable to corrupt the moral andethical codes of mainstream Malayalee society.Interestingly the text developed around the issue offish stink and it became a theme image of the text.The solo play was scripted on the occasion of the Earth Summit, Johannesburg in South Africa.

Synopsis of Matsyagandi

Matsyaganddhi, literally 'the one who smells of fish'is a play that looks at the life and times of thefishing community in the context of globalization. Narrated in the form of a monologue by a fish-vending woman, the play brings to life various issues relating to the ecology and economy of fishing. It looks at the community life of the fisher folk from inside – a life that is being increasingly marginalized and livelihood made more and more impossible by the spread of the disastrous technology and oppressive economic and social relations. Weaving several contemporary incidents and insights into the narrative, the play throws up several dualities that map her and her folks' marginality - between fish-stink and upper class concerns about body odor,sea water and fresh water, low life on the streets versus safe compartmentalized life of the high, the lives of women versus men etc.

In the end, she realizes that the malaise runs much deeper and wider. She mourns "Look, this stench does not come from my basket. It's the stench of the sea decaying. It's the stench of the little fishes being slaughtered by the trawler nets. It's the stench of the decaying dreams of Matsyaganddhis.