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ShareMumbai: After touring Rangashankara at Bangalore, Pune-based director Sushama Deshpande is in Mumbai with her controversial play My Mother, The Gharwali, Her Maalak, His Wife, and it drew angry protests from a few members of the audience while it was being staged at the 8th Women Playwrights' International Conference.
The play that holds a mirror to the daily activities in a red light area, in this case the district of Sangli, has a 24 character cast that consists of actual sex workers and their kids.
Sushama would have been satisfied with an all-adult cast except that no professional male actor was willing to perform on stage while the sex workers painted a realistic version of their lives alongside them.
"The children of the sex workers were more than willing to support their mothers on the stage. The women, mostly uneducated, had to depend on their kids to memorise their lines," the 53-year-old director says.
The play took shape after an intensive workshop by several NGOs to give a public voice to these women. The sex workers wanted to protest against how they are often misrepresented in Bollywood films. "While their primary language is Marathi, all the sex workers decided they would do the play in Hindi so that they could reach out to the audience at the national level." The group is looking to take the play abroad as well.
Interestingly, once the groundwork for the play was done, the organisers couldn't get a director, and that's when Sushama stepped in. "These are real life stories of how the police misbehave with these women, how local politicians treat them and the many nuances of their lives behind closed doors."
While stage rehearsals can be very demanding in terms of time and energy, the sex workers were allowed to carry on with their daily affairs as usual. "We couldn't ask them to stop their business. After all, it earns them their daily bread," says Sushama. "Seeing their efforts to be embraced by the mainstream makes the experience enriching. After all, theirs is the oldest profession in the world."
