Pune: Play brings to fore hygiene issues, utter loss of dignity

PUNE: Ojas S V, a theatre artist and director, recalled how affected she was when she had heard of a pregnant woman dying in an Andhra factory.

The workers at the factory were allowed only one four-minute break a day. “As she was pregnant, this worker needed to urinate frequently. But she was not allowed to. One day, she suffered a miscarriage at the factory and died,” Ojas said.

O Womaniya, a play by the Jing Kieng Jri theatre group, draws on this social issue. It deals with the struggles women — from all walks of life — face while claiming their right to urinate. The one-hour show, directed by Ojas, was first staged in 2013 and has since toured many cities. In 2015, the screenplay was adapted into a radio play, for which it even bagged a national award in 2018.

Speaking to TOI, Ojas said, “Me and around five of my friends — some of them theatre artists themselves — travel together a lot. All of us got talking about how there are so few toilets for women and the whole right to pee.”

“We realised it is not just about the unavailability of toilets. It is also about basic sanitation, hygiene, dignity and there’s so much shame associated with the topic. Men can urinate anywhere. Women can’t. Women suffer the most while travelling. Especially during long overnight bus journeys, we hardly have access to clean toilets. This placed a germ of an idea in my head,” Ojas said.

She then talked to her friends. “We decided against presenting the play in a serious manner. That would seem like propaganda. We thought of exploring clown theatre kind of storytelling.”

She added that the writing was a collective effort. “It took around six-eight months for it to come together,” she said.

The show, has been performed in Hindi and Marathi across Maharashtra. It has also been performed at Jabalpur and Hyderabad. “The response has been good. Women relate to it, and sometimes, after the performance, they come up and say ‘that girl in that scene was me’,” Ojas said.

About how, men respond, she added, “They ask us whether something like that really happened. They often don’t realise that in the buses and other public spaces, women and have no toilets.”

The play’s success led it to being adapted for the radio in 2015. “A friend who works for the All India Radio thought this play could do well on radio. After many meetings, we did the adaptation.” In 2018, the play was aired on Akashwani Pune and went on to win a national-level contest.