Farber’s Nirbhaya and BBC’s ‘India’s Daughter’

from ‘ ‘Something adequate’? In memoriam Seamus Heaney, Sister Quinlan, Nirbhaya’,  AHHE 13 1-2 2014  by Jan Parker               (http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/13/1-2/141) 

Full article available for free download!

What kind of performance can lay to rest ‘Nirbhaya’, the victim of the Delhi bus rape and evisceration?

(The subject of BBC Storyville’s ‘India’s Daughter’ shown 4.3.2015 but banned in India: ‘BBC ignores ban, telecasts Nirbhaya documentary’  Times of India Mar 5, 2015.)

In late 2012 a shocking story was broken by Indian news media: a female medical student and her boyfriend caught a bus home. The driver of the bus and a group of youths overpowered them, dragged the girl off and beat and raped her repeatedly, blows from an iron bar eviscerating her.  The victim of the ‘Delhi bus rape’, given, in an act of belated protection, the pseudonym ‘Nirbhaya’: ‘the Fearless One’, clung for weeks to life while lackadaisical criminal investigations eventually rounded up the perpetrators, one of whom talked to BBC Storyville’s reporter on death row.

Mass protests throughout India and internationally seemed powerless to change a culture of acceptance of all kinds of brutality against women, in ‘the rape capital’ Delhi and elsewhere. Nirbhaya died; in her name the South African director Yael Farber crafted a play with the victims of atrocity – mass rape, familial sexual abuse, dowry-bride attempted murder. A few months later the play was performed in Edinburgh at the Festival, in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, audience sitting in conclave facing a stage bare except a side with a set of seats and hanging straps. From various places in the auditorium women stood up, one hand held high, demanding the right to speak. Gracefully – as was every act in this production – they formed a line and mounted the stage, reminding me forcefully of the entry of the chorus in a Greek tragedy, where a white robed figure stood waiting – Nirbhaya.

Such metatheatricality, breaking the physical and emotional division of actors from spectators, implicating the audience, is not surprising to the experienced Edinburgh Festival goer. But, this was not a coup de the´aˆtre: the women were preparing to tell their own stories, envoiced by the spirit of Nirbhaya the fearless, and Yael Farber, the theatre director who was contacted by women affected by and recognising her atrocious suffering. Like a Greek chorus the women moved together to support and re-enact both rape and evisceration, before the final laying to rest, a symbolic reintegrating of the body, folding back the viscera, washing and shrouding the body in a swirl of incense and sand which spread over the audience and chorus. But inbetween the re-enactments members in turn went back to the seats and hanging straps of the ‘bus’ and drew from their seat pocket a length of cloth that became a protective canopy, a cover for incest, veil, shroud or in one case – the dowry bride – the lovingly held clothes of the child that had been taken away from her. This beautifully crafted, beautifully choreographed and, yes, beautiful production came to the international stage a few months after Nirbhaya died, while those convicted of her rape and torture were awaiting sentence. While the workshops from which the witnesses’ stories were crafted developed from experience to performance, there were mass demonstrations and political protest, demanding that such abuse must not be allowed … not, to not happen again: sadly, it will, almost daily, not only in rape city Delhi but also to women around the world. But that it must not be allowed to go untold and unheard.

My mind went immediately to Euripides’ Trojan Women, similarly produced during the winter after a particular atrocity: the subjugation by Athens of a free Greek state, Melos; the male audience, sitting in the same ‘tribal’ blocks as when they voted for the killing of all adult men and the enslavement of the women and children, were presented with the suffering of enslaved women, wives and daughters, similar to those they had recently been offered in the marketplace or brothels. But Euripides and Greek tragedy use distancing effects: a masked professional actor playing an iconic ruined queen, Hecuba; the fall is that of Troy. In Nirbhaya, the acting is not professional but a profession; there are no masks, and as every commentator has mentioned, one face bore the scars of the burning kerosene that was poured on her by her in-laws, while her infant son watched. There was infinite beauty in the crafting, choreographing and formal reenacting of the events of 12 December and her death in January 2013: living up to Seamus Heaney’s demands that poetry, the poiesis – creative making – of atrocity, should have both ‘documentary adequacy’ but also the formal qualities that have ‘the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it’ (Heaney Nobel address).

The play ended with self-witness. Each woman in turn named herself and her family: daughter of…, wife of… – those who had perpetrated or closed their eyes to the violence – and left the playing area as they arrived, hand held high through an audience that rose as one, shedding for them the tears that they had bold-facedly, bare-facedly, refused to shed. It was this naming that brought the act back to the world of Greek tragedy, where theatre’s role is to re-enact the story, the meaning of the name, so that it will not be forgotten.

Troy is dead, say the chorus of Trojan women; not so, it is re-vivified in the performance.

Edinburgh is full of political and brutal theatre, of plays written precisely for this festival event, this receptive audience and for playing spaces and a schedule that leaves no room or time for comfy three act-ers.

But this was not simply that, simply consciousness-raising or even action-provoking, though as with Trojan Women there could be no doubt of the playwright’s reason for writing. Rather, this was a joining in witness to the suffering of the ‘Fearless One’ and to the courage of those who came forward to show us what they had suffered.