Satish Alekar is arguably among the most thought-provoking playwrights in Marathi today. Situated in the Marathi ethos of Pune, his play under review is at once national and transnational in its thought and content. Consequently, frequent references to prominent places, spots and social as well as literary figures in Pune are mingled with contemporary politics in India, in particular, and state-society ties across time and space, in general. In a word, the play is both imaginative and brilliant. It subtly unravels the predicament of those precariously placed individuals who are somewhere suspended in the ‘middle’.
The backdrop of this play is the COVID-19 pandemic that played havoc all over the world, including India. There have been antecedents of pandemics on such a scale, and Alekar has alluded to the Spanish flu that claimed the life of Ram Ganesh Gadkari, a famous Marathi playwright. Alekar has anchored his theme on a fragile eighty-year-old man who is helplessly sitting in a wheelchair and negotiating with difficult times during COVID-19. The only viable option for him to survive is through reminiscences, pondering and in continuous dialogue with Thaki, a character of a slightly younger age. The old man is a widower. I feel his dialogue with Thaki could well be construed as a dialogue between his conscious and subconscious mind.
The health emergency under COVID-19 bestowed enormous power to the state in India to regulate and curb the deadly pandemic.
While regulating civic life, lockdown and curfew were declared overnight and extended time and again. The authoritarian nature of India’s state apparatus became conspicuous as the state sharpened its coercive arms like the police to regulate human movements and victimized many citizens. Besides, the state took the responsibility of providing vaccination to the entire population through its own machinery. In substance, the government dominated over society in all the spheres of activities during the pandemic. Alekar further suggests that constitutionalism that respects the division of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial organs of the state and operates through mechanisms of checks and balances has been gradually on the wane in India since 2014. Under such conditions, executive power almost becomes unaccountable. In this light, he examines state-society ties in contemporary times by reflecting on a typical middle-class mindset that is stuck in an unenviable ‘middle’.
During the pandemic (and after?), the middle classes in India have been particularly dormant unlike yesteryears. Thus, you have the pandemic on the one hand and institutionalized fear on the other. Fear becomes an instrument of autocratic rule to suppress any form of dissent, especially in the universities and the media. An average middle-class citizen who has tasted the fruits of democracy would feel suffocated under these circumstances. They are often caught in the stage of interregnum.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, had studied the interregnum as a phase quite keenly. In simple terms, interregnum signifies a stalemated power relationship. People live under stagnation because it is hard to bring about any change in the prevailing order and ensure the emergence of a new order. Besides, the digital revolution has made lives complicated, and people are unwittingly attracted to imaginary images rather than imaginative realities. WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are integral to the digital world which has witnessed an alarming resurgence of post-truth politics. Digitalization may offer a good escape route for individual citizens to run away from realities, but it gives space to those in power to tighten the levers of power and control constitutionally sanctioned freedoms of all the citizens.
In the midst of this complex quagmire, Alekar strategically weaponizes the metaphor of the single black thread (Ekta Kargota) that is used around the waist to hold the undergarments to shed light on complex political situations. In the play, Gadkari passes an envelope containing the black thread of silk that was significant to his very being, to another playwright named Diwakar before he passes away. Diwakar passes that envelope unopened on to VV Bokil, another literary figure. Eventually, the famous playwright Vijay Tendulkar gets hold of that envelope when he is in school. In fact, the black thread can be real/symbolic or just a metaphor that binds traditions, spaces, places and powerful dissenters across time within their context. Thus, the personal, the political, the historical, cultural and metaphysical worlds start revolving around the thread. Alekar’s graphic illustrations of the diverse threads such as Ganda (around the wrist) Mala (around the neck) and the black thread shown at the end of the text are quite evocative. They speak volumes about different times and places in the world while underscoring the complex nature of power relationships between states and societies. Through such graphics, Alekar explores the domain of the political and unmasks the nature of individuals/groups that wield state power. Power has always been associated with violence, overt or covert. In spite of his transnational proclivities, however, Alekar does not lose sight of the nature of democracy in India. In any democracy, the state has the legitimate monopoly over ‘organized physical force’. It is in this context that the notion of fear and violence creeps into the mind of that fragile old man in the play who is simultaneously negotiating with the pandemic and state power through his dialogue with Thaki.
Evidently, like the old man, citizens begin to search for answers to questions that have no easy answers because they are living in a complex socio-political milieu. Constitutionally, the citizens have all the political and civil rights, but they are scared of expressing themselves owing to their loss of faith in the system itself. But as they choose to withdraw from harsh realities owing to the pandemic or an oppressive regime, they start living in a make-believe world facilitated by digitalization. If they comment on the real world or raise inconvenient questions, they fear that they could be dubbed as ‘urban Naxals’ and may face detention without any trial for a long time. In the bargain, many citizens out of fear surrender their civil and political rights. Alekar’s statement sounds brutal because his disturbing political satire warns us about the frightening times that are awaiting us.
Rajen Harshé is the founder and former Vice Chancellor of Central University of Allahabad, Prayagraj.