Bob Marley from Kodihalli: Is real equality a chimera?
Bob Marley from Kodihalli is an extremely bold play. Apart from being experimental and Brechtian, a technique that very clearly stops the audience from becoming too emotionally drawn so that they can be actively engaged in critical thinking. And measured insight is what you need in this play – its overriding theme of social inequality is searing and eye-opening. The actors very efficiently ‘break the Fourth Wall' that is par for the course in the Brechtian Gestus style of acting – in which the actors directly address the audience, affirming the artificiality of the situation, which is further heightened by a minimalistic set, music and background sounds that add to the 'suspension' of reality.
What stands out to me is a sense of depletion – a brutal stripping off – both of identity and self in an individual. What emerges through the stories that each of the three dramatis personae – a guitar-playing bartender aptly named Bob Marley, a teacher, and a stand-up comic, all from strife-torn Dalit backgrounds – tell – is the unbelievable violence each of them have faced in their respective childhoods. Childhoods that shaped their adult consciousness, made them move to big cities from the starkly flawed social constructs they had inhabited, the cruelty they are still trying to run away from and that still doggedly follows them, accursed as they are by their indelible caste identity.
We encounter these three uniquely conflicted individuals as tenants in a present-day Bengaluru apartment building, whose non-vegetarian and therefore unclean Dalit identity has just been revealed to the other inhabitants by a dog who was found chewing a bone discarded in their garbage. They have been asked to forthwith vacate the premises which must be 'cleansed' of their presence…
The play is an intense, tragi-comic and existentialist portrayal of oppression that Dalits, even in a 21st-century urban ecosystem, must still confront. What it provokes is a profoundly disturbing question - is there ever going to be a breaking free of the shackles that centuries of exploitative caste violence has engendered? Is a liberal, inclusive society really waiting in the wings, yet to emerge? Or does hope only lie in these three youth's utopic vision of a life that is outside the 'gravitational force' of caste and identity – a life they seek when they observe the power of a firefly – whose miniscule size belies its might – a tiny creature that generates so much light in darkness. A life whose final triumph will come when Bob Marley, an icon of Jamaican Rastafarianism, can be appropriated by everyone, including a Dalit bartender from Kodihalli, who is never made to forget his roots.
A play in Kannada by Jangama Collective, directed by KP Lakshman, the production is also a tribute to the innate rebellion embedded in reggae music – Marley's immortal song 'Get up, stand up; stand up for your rights' is a recurring leitmotif, as is B R Ambedkar's haunting expose of untouchability in Indian society, 'Waiting for a Visa'. It is a play rich in nature allegory, sardonic humour and visual metaphor and leaves us with a mentally rupturing thought - is survival the only way to beat oppression?
Bob Marley from Kodihalli, with subtitles in English, will be staged at the 20th Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) Festival on March 18th at Sri Ram Centre in New Delhi. Tickets are available on metawards.com and bookmyshow.com. Don't miss it.
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