A crowd-funding campaign is slowly gaining ground for a pan-Indian theatre project under which a sprawling 30-day performative journey will be carried out on Indian trains by eight ‘performer-facilitators’ drawn from across the country. The Bengaluru-based Maraa Collective’s UR/Unreserved will find expression on the Great Indian Railways that has, for more than a century and a half, been one of India’s great levellers, and also a reflection of its fractured yet resilient national psyche. Theatre practitioner Anish Victor will be at the helm of affairs. Collaborators from Karnataka, Assam, Kashmir and Kerala will be at hand during separate legs of the journey, which is certainly very ambitious in scope, and carries with it the charge of ‘gentle defiance and quiet resistance’ as a scratch squad will look to excavate and challenge notions of identity — political or personal, gendered or neutral, collective or individual.
The project’s number-crunchers tell us that the performing team will traverse 12 sleeper coaches, four unreserved compartments, and reach 10,000 people in 30 days. The conceptualisation of this project began as far back as December 2016, and it will expect to wind down by March 2018. The campaign amount of Rs. 4 lakhs will help sustain the efforts of 14 people over 15 months — this group includes theatre practitioners, visual artists, animators, film makers, dancers, writers and musicians. Generous peer-to-peer contributions and funding from the India Foundation for the Arts have sustained them during the initial phase.
On the move
The epic journey, that is the project’s raison d’être, will take place over five circuitous routes on the rail network. The first leg travels from Bengaluru to Guwahati. Passengers and train personnel will be drawn into an exchange of stories and recollections seeking to ‘re-imagine individual journeys of identity’. Games, tricks and songs are part of the group’s arsenal to foster a playful and congenial space where conversations rather than confrontations can thrive, even in a space that is as dynamic and rapidly altering as a train compartment.
That trains are ‘safe spaces’ is no longer a given — safety for women has always been a concern, and the recent lynching in a Mathura-bound train proves that frenzied partisanship is no sleeping serpent. For the troupe, the constant daily negotiations would well prove both rewarding or trying, and the uncertainty should add immeasurably to the uncommon experience they have set themselves up for. They are not just travelling entertainers or pop-up acts, but change-makers almost, and the state of the country becomes their turf for existential query and introspection.
Cross country histrionics
From Guwahati the troupe will head to Dhemaji, an outlying district in Assam bordering Arunachal Pradesh, where the first ‘Platform 1’ event will be organised. This refers to a sharing of learnings — via performance pieces, installations or films — from each concluded leg of the journey, and will be facilitated by a local arts organisation. In Assam, it is the Dhemaji-based Macbeth Drama, one of the very few groups in the country that works to preserve and showcase indigenous culture. In 2014, Victor had performed his solo performance piece, Koogu, at their permanent work-space, Naisargik Nathyakshetra, in the remote village of Duhutimukh, so the end of the first leg will be marked by a reunion.
The other legs of UR/Unreserved will take place from Guwahati to Jammu, and from there to Thrissur, and finally back to source, with Platform 1 events slated to be held in Srinagar, Irinjalakuda and Bengaluru. In Kashmir, their local collaborators, the Help Foundation has worked with victims of conflict for almost two decades and views theatre as a means for catharsis. “There are no public spaces in Srinagar. The military has occupied most of it,” says its director, Nighat Shafi, and hopes UR/Unreserved will create the much-needed spaces for expression and dialogue. The Innerspace Little Theatre are the Kerala partners.
Political statement
The title UR/Unreserved certainly brings to mind frenetic train journeys in claustrophobic compartments, but it also references the caste category, UR, that falls just outside the pale of affirmative action. In the constant flux of a train travel, we see glimpses of a level playing field as well as social hierarchies in play. A recent flashpoint was the 2012 exodus of North-Easterners from Bengaluru, which was widely sensationalised in the media. As Maraa states, “The images and stories of women, children and men fleeing in thousands on trains, with their hurriedly gathered belongings, was the starting point for the idea of UR/Unreserved.”
In a later phase, the project seeks to tour with a travelling exhibition — a ‘basket of ideas’ from the process to different public spaces. According to the organisers, “These will be publications, short films, podcasts, sketches, maps, photographs curated to strengthen and deepen our engagement with students, artists and the general public.” While the frisson of the live journeys may be available only ephemerally to some, the rich human experiences collated over time will certainly percolate down to those who join the excursion at a later stage. A comprehensive book, full of notes and reflections and personal effects, is also being planned.
Maraa Collective’s UR/Unreserved campaign can be supported at ketto.org /fundraiser/comeunreserved