Partition pain on stage as Manto’s tales retold 70 years on

GURUGRAM: In a year that sees India mark 70 years as a free country, old ghosts continue to haunt. Had he been alive today,

Saadat Hasan Manto

would have found plenty of material for his darkly acerbic and satire-laced writings. Which was pretty much the purpose behind ‘Broadcast’, a dramatisation of 28 of Manto’s short stories, penned during the riots around Partition. Lest we forget.

Deeply disturbing and powerful, ‘Broadcast’ skillfully fused recitation with music to create an atmosphere of dread, eerily revealing the thread that links the India of 1947 with the India of 2017.

These stories are taken from ‘

Siyah Hashiye

’, or ‘Black Margins’. They are, actually, more cameos, often only a few paragraphs long. They explode like the violence they describe, erupt like the hatreds they expose, and gush like the blood that flowed all too freely in those mad, mad days 70 years ago.

Applying words like a bayonet, Manto brilliantly – and savagely – skewers the follies and foibles of men, using episodes commonplace (and sometimes, not so) to unmask their intentions. In these sketches, injected with brutal truths, there’s irony and there’s farce, and Fouzia Dastango, adeptly and vicariously, was able to get under the skin of Manto’s characters, and the often absurd scenarios he visualised.

The set was designed like a museum of Partition, a space that sits neglected and dilapidated. Its relics – a pair of boots, a lantern, an old radio – gather dust, just like the memories of Partition gather cobwebs in our minds.

‘Broadcast’ begins with flickering lights and the crackle of a radio that seemingly hasn’t been tuned into since 1947. Waves of static come and go, the voices on the wireless almost numb to the slaughter they’re witness to. Throughout the dramatisation, a little over an hour in length, the aural backdrop convincingly draws out the menace and the fear of the times (ours, and our ancestors’).

The versatile Stefan Kaye (accompanied by

Makrand Sanon

and Ritika Singh) orchestrates the soundscape, going from dark to deranged to dystopic. It all ends amid a claustrophobic wall of noise, a doomsday piano pounding away amid a crashing gong and the thunder of drumbeats, evoking the fear and violence of the moment, of a world crashing down around us (then, and now).

Broadcast is an uncomfortable experience but it’s meant to be. It picks you up, shakes you and leaves you dazed. In its recalling of the bloodbath 70 years ago, this piece of drama — conceived, directed and produced by Eagle Claw, and hosted by OddBird Theatre — caution against the venom being injected into the body politic today (by leaders big and small who should know better), and seeks to underscore how imperative it is to counter the hate and the bile through reason and debate – and plenty of parody.

Saadat

Hasan Manto

doesn’t offer us answers but he does forewarn that it takes little for man’s basest emotions to surface. Where are the Mantos of today? They’re nowhere and they’re everywhere, voices on the Internet broadcasting to the land the dangers of the hatreds that engulf us.

Stay updated with the latest news on Times of India. Don't miss yearly career horoscopes 2025 for Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.