Valley stages protest on encounters

It is a unique catharsis where protest is not slogan-shouting, stone-pelting young men fighting pitched battles with the police.

It is a unique catharsis where protest is not slogan-shouting, stone-pelting young men fighting pitched battles with the police. The postcard of Kashmir’s protest has finally graduated from the streets to the realm of the theatre.

Two months after the expose of fake encounter killings by the police and the army, which roiled the Valley, the theme of a play staged in Srinagar to mark the World Theatre Day on Tuesday had the incident as its subject. Revolving around the sudden disappearance and subsequent murder of an attar-vendor, the play titled White Paper was, according to its author Muhammad Amin Bhat an

attempt to create a new refined language of the protest in the strife-torn state.

In fact, the play borrowed directly from the broad storylines of the fake encounters to the point of the name and occupation of now prominent victim Abdul Rehman Padroo. Performing as an attar-vendor on a busy city street, Rehman in the play, finds his ordinary self caught up in the throes of the Kashmir situation. He goes missing and a painstaking search, which constitutes the play’s dramatic core, leads the audience to his obscure corner grave. Narcissus is growing wild on his grave, a reminder of his humble occupation as a vendor of perfumes.

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“My effort was to tell a story. A story that touches and concerns all of us,” said the playwright Muhammad Amin Bhat. The play had a deeply personal relevance to Bhat as well. Three months ago security forces killed his younger brother at their native town Baramulla. It was a case of mistaken identity.

However, the White Paper was not only a linear rendition of its topical theme. There was an attempt, albeit with little success, to get a broad-brush picture of the state of affairs.

Rehman’s humble pavement moorings get meshed up in the Kashmir’s turbulent political thoroughfare and its shady operations across the land. There are hooded, unidentified presences lurking in the corners or running amok on the stage. There are ordinary people displaying ingenuous and crafty skills to survive the daily odds.

“It is not only a play grappling with the present issues. My effort has been to raise the level of the debate, to shape a refined language of protest which is what the role of the Art should be,” Bhat said in his speech at the end of the play.