Review: Ambedkar Aur Gandhi
Ambedkar Aur Gandhi
Making history present, seeing it unfold in front of your own eyes is a strange thing. Seldom do we ‘make present’ characters we know well from the past. Seldom do we conflate the personal and the political when it comes to people such as Ambedkar and Gandhi, who’ve played a large part in shaping the way India is today, hardly do we understand them as people. The play Ambedkar Aur Gandhi does this with very interesting results. A socio-political play as it claims itself to be, it brings to the fore the little idiosyncrasies Gandhi and Ambedkar held, it makes them human rather than alienated historical figures to whom we only have connections to through our textbooks.
What, to the audience who’ve been frequenting META plays, distinguishes Gandhi Aur Ambedkar from other plays, is the stark lighting, the minimal props and stage sets, the intensity of dialogue and the number of sub-characters (numbering close to forty) who lend a certain body to the play as well as the voices of the two primary characters. In other words, it is a fledgeling India unfolding on stage in sepia tones.
For those of you who are familiar with history and the dialogues between Ambedkar and Gandhi leading up to the Poona Pact of 1932, the play does not bring anything new in terms of a reconstitution of historical events, rather, it reinterprets the two primary actors in the dialogue and reinterprets the circumstances that lead to the forging of the pact. What is interesting is that the play, at a certain point of time toward the middle shows two people relating to each other as human beings and not as a Mahatma to a Dalit. The decision that leads Ambedkar’s ending Gandhi’s fast is shown to have come about as a result of a conversation with his wife, Rama. The play depicts how beautifully a woman’s wisdom is conceptually so much more different from a man’s.
The message however is clear, and it is this – in the fight for Dalit assertion, it is Ambedkar’s vision that should’ve been implemented. What comes about clearly in the play though is that both Ambedkar and Gandhi were ultimately troubled men, fighting to right the wrongs they felt infected India at the time, a torn Ambedkar having to balance the duty toward his people and the Mahatm’s health on one hand, and a torn Gandhi having to reconcile his beliefs with his moral responsibilities. Tis a dialogue, a dialogue between two souls.
The penultimate scene is that of a solitary Gandhi who confesses all that plague his mind in a monologue with the audience. At the end of the monologue, he walks off into the shadows. This possibly is the only moment of respite he recieves throughout the whole play. The rest of the hour and a half the play spans is dominated by passionate dialogues delivered by Ambedkar, each of which elicited a round of applause from the audience. The last scene, possibly the most powerful moment in the play sees a mournful Ambedkar against a blood-red backdrop, the monologue follows the aftermath of Gandhi’s murder. The parting message is one of reconciliation with an old man’s narrow ways and resentment at the murder itself which halted dialogues mid-way. Despite differences, a parting is always sad.
- Vipin Krishna (META Secretariat)
