New Delhi: For four days, Mahmood Farooqui sat in an almost empty room inside Tihar Jail. There was no cast, no script reading, and little indication that his idea of starting a drama class behind bars would work out as a liberating catharsis.
Farooqui, the co-director of the film Peepli (Live) who is known for his revival of the Dastangoi storytelling form, was serving a seven-year sentence following his conviction in a sexual assault case in 2016. In 2017, Delhi High Court overturned his conviction. For Farooqui, the idea began taking shape during his first stint in Tihar in 2015, when he spent four months as an undertrial.
For the prisoners, the performances offered a path to “catharsis, hope and redemption”, he said. Rarely are even professional actors so unselfconscious,” actor Naseeruddin Shah said after seeing the performances at the launch of the memoir. At the time, however, he was in no state to pursue this idea, he later said. “Drama is not something that people have been trained to do or people think of doing,” Farooqui said, particularly among those from poorer backgrounds with little exposure to theatre. “The autobiographical exercises made acting more accessible, and also gave the inmates a way to express experiences that were otherwise difficult to articulate,” he said. Bhanu Raghav, who spent about five-and-a-half years in Tihar in connection with a murder case, said that joining the theatre class meant stepping into a world he had never known. “Slowly, we learnt how scripts and dialogues had to be done, how the delivery should be, how to move on stage, how to take steps and what the body language should be,” Raghav said. Farooqui said the inmates’ familiarity with the epic meant that sometimes they knew details that he did not.
He had denied the allegations. The Supreme Court subsequently declined to interfere with the acquittal. In his memoir, The Tihar Players — which was published this July — Farooqui recounted how that tentative experiment flowered into several productions. “It was one of the most emotionally authentic performances I’ve seen. “I was in a shell. I was totally shocked and I just couldn’t make sense of anything,” he recalled. Music and singing already had a presence inside the jail, but theatre was unfamiliar territory for many inmates. Their own lives became the easiest starting point. Farooqui asked the inmates to recreate scenes from their wards, like encounters with prison staff, moments with their families and the hierarchies of everyday prison life. When the group staged Ramleela, it had to improvise around prison restrictions. Fire could not be used, nor could anything sharp that would resemble arrows.