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written and directed by Yaël Farber

Assembly, Riverside Studios and Poorna Jagannathan,

presented by Nightwood Theatre and Amnesty International,

Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto

November 18-29, 2015

Poorna Jagannathan: “I raise my hand because silences are what make us complicit in the violence”

Nirbhaya is one of the most powerful works of political theatre you ever are likely to see.  Yaël Farber’s play has no less a goal than to stop violence against women and to achieve that goal combines personal testimony with theatrical imagery of incredible beauty, simplicity and emotional force.  This is no one-sided diatribe because Farber’s insight into the issue is so deep.  Farber shows that violence against women is an inevitable consequence of the view of women as inferior to men that shockingly still exists even the most developed societies.  As a result to end such violence requires massive social and political change.

The beginning of such a change is the awareness the such violence exists.  Social conventions have dictated that abused women remain silent about abuse.  Yet, this very silence supports the status quo that engendered such abuse in the first place.  Farber sees a beginning of the social change necessary to stop violence against women in the reaction across the world to the death of a young woman violently raped in Delhi in 2012.

On December 16, 2012, 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey and her male friend Awindra Pratap Pandey were looking for a bus home after seeing a movie that night.  A teenager told them that a chartered bus would be going in their direction.  When they boarded, there were only six men on the bus, including the driver.  When Awindra asked why the bus was not going in the right direction, the men taunted Awindra and gagged and beat him with an iron rod until he was unconscious.  Then, as the driver continued to drive, the five other men beat Jyoti with the rod, gang raped her for ten hours while she fought back and penetrated her with a wheel jack handle. 

After the rape was over, the couple was thrown from the moving bus and the driver tried to run Jyoti over, but she was saved by Awindra’s pulling her away in time.  Since the names of rape victims could not be published in newspapers, the papers began calling her “Nirbhaya”, meaning “fearless” in Hindi.  Awindra survived the attack, but Jyoti, who had suffered severe internal injuries, died on December 29.

Protests for stronger laws protecting women had already begun on December 21, but after  Jyoti’s death protests spread all over India, into neighbouring countries and around the world, with even the U.N. Secretary-General speaking out against violence against women. 

One signal aspect of Jyoti’s attack and death, of prime importance to Farber’s play, was that women realized that they should no longer be silent about the abuse they had suffered.  Coming forward about this abuse would help make society realize how widespread it is and break society’s taboo of discussing the subject which only causes victims of violence more suffering. 

The essential question Farber clearly puts forward is why, in crimes like theft and murder, shame falls on the perpetrator but in the crime of rape, shame falls on the victim.  It is one thing for the victims to feel unclean after a sexual assault, but why does society treat them as unclean also?  Farber's play exposes the illogic of this way of thinking that exists even in rich, economically developed societies and holds it up for our scrutiny and condemnation. 

The play, performed by six women and one man, begins with choral narration of what life for a woman is like in Delhi.  Trains and buses are so packed that a woman attempting to move through the crowd has to become used to running a gauntlet of men inappropriately touching and feeling her.  This prelude, where the women play the roles of men, demonstrates how an ingrained societal attitude that regards women as sexual objects directly contributes to further forms of degrading and defiling women. 

The chorus narrates the events of December 16, 2012, with Japjit Kaur playing Jyoti and Ankur Vikal as Awindra.  It stops just before the rape of Jyoti began.  Then in a series of monologues that make up the bulk of the play, the five women, excluding Kaur, narrate their own experiences of abuse.  Farber’s text states that Nirbhaya’s story turned from fact into a kind of myth.  In the play, Kaur, who is clad in white and only sings and never speaks in English, stands against a door-sized upright wall as if it were a shrine.  One by one each of the other five women raise a hand in a sign of solidarity with Nirbhaya, walk up to her and receive from her the props necessary to tell their story.  Farber thus demonstrates theatrically how Nirbhaya empowers the women to speak.

The true stories are all harrowing but are enacted in such stylized fashion that we are not meant merely to sympathize with the women emotionally but analyze intellectually the forces behind their abuse.

Poorna Jagannathan, a Muslim woman, tells how as a girl of only eight she was continually abused by a respected friend of her family.  Her father already used to beat her, but when she tried to tell her parents what was happening, his beatings only became more severe.

Rukhsar Kabir, gets a break to appear in Bollywood movie, but when her father learns of this he tracks her down to the studio, beats her and cuts her face with a broken bottle.  Viewing her as a “tainted” woman, her parents force her into an arranged marriage.  All goes well until she believes she can trust her husband enough to tell him about her past.  Then he becomes enraged and she becomes a  victim of marital rape until she escapes.

        

Priyanka Bose is abused by various relatives and male family friends from childhood onwards.  What makes this worse is that her parents are aware of what is happening and do nothing.  She shares her room with her younger brother and the only thing that helps her cope with her abuse is that he has witnessed it and knows she is not at fault.  However, once the brother is old enough, he is sent away to a private boarding school for boys.  Now she has no one to vouch for her innocence and her ordeal becomes worse.  When her brother returns home from school, she notices the light of innocence has left his eyes and immediately knows that he, too, as suffered sexual abuse.

Lest the audience assume, that Canada is somehow immune from violence against women, Farber includes the testimony of actor Pamela Mala Sinha, who has previously recounted her experience in her award-winning solo play Crash (2012).  Sinha was raped by a stranger who broke into her Montreal apartment.

The true stories cover a wide range physical and sexual abuse.  The women are Hindu and Muslim.  Their attackers are relatives, family friends, husbands and fathers.  Though men commit the abuse, Farber does not hesitate to point out when other women compound the severity of the men’s crimes by saying or doing nothing or shunning the abused woman.  Farber’s play is also not anti-male.  She points out the conditions of poverty that engendered rage in Nibhaya’s attackers.  She shows how Nirbhaya’s boyfriend tries to help her.  For Sneha Jawale seeing her son again is her greatest hope.  And the example of Priyanka Bose’s brother shows that not only women are subject to sexual violence.

The abstractness with which each of these stories is enacted only increases their power.  Usually the only prop the women are given by Nirbhaya is a cloth.  Under Farber’s endlessly inventive direction the cloth can become various kinds of male and female clothing, a bed, a path, a woman’s hair and even a whip.  During Sinha’s narration, another actor envelops herself in a cloth miming the helplessness and entrapment Sinha feels. 

For other narratives, Farber uses other kinds of alienation effects.  Sneha Jawale tells her story in her own native language, first translated into English by a woman and then by Ankur Vikal.  Those not knowing Jawale’s language will only hear the pain and emotion that the tone of her words carry.  This makes an extreme contrast to the completely dispassionate tone of the narrator.  The separation of the emotion of the story from the meaning of the words only emphasizes Jawale’s complete isolation from everyone around her. 

Oroon Das’s set consists only of six one-person bus seats, six bus windows hanging as a backdrop and the door-sized piece of wood that becomes the back of Nirbhaya’s “shrine”.  After the five women’s stories, the play concludes with the rest of the story of  Jyoti’s attack through her death in hospital.  The cast’s wordless preparation of Jyoti's body for her funeral, again using only a single large cloth, is, perhaps, the most beautiful and most moving sequence in the play so imbued is it with the love, care and honour that the others bear Jyoti.  The play concludes with the unprecedented marches that occurred after the news of Jyoti’s death and how she as Nirbhaya inspired other women also to be fearless, to recount their stories, and men to join them in denouncing violence against women.             

Nirbhaya has already toured to London, New York, Dublin, Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai before making its Canadian debut in Vancouver.  This is urgent, necessary, heart-breaking and inspiring theatre that must be seen. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) The Nirbhaya company, ©2013 Sinbad Phgura. Ankur Vikal and Priyanka Bose; Japjit Kaur as Nirbhaya, ©2013 William Burdett-Coutts.

For tickets, visit: www.nightwoodtheatre.net.