A scripted performance in Chandigarh puts stubble burning in focus

The performative hearing saw real activists and lawyers working not only within a script but also within conventions of the National Green Tribunal.

Climate policy researcher Manish Shrivastava addresses the jury. | Photo Credit: Khoj International Artists’ Association

A witness box. A panel of distinguished judges. Lawyers in black robes. “Prayers” to the court. These are scenes from In the Matter Re: Rights of Nature, a staged hearing that addresses the links between air pollution in Delhi NCR and the agricultural practice of stubble burning in the neighbouring States of Punjab and Haryana.

Conceived by Khoj International Artists’ Association and the theatre director and lighting designer, Zuleikha Chaudhari, in collaboration with the lawyer Harish Mehla, it was staged at Chandigarh’s Open Hand monument on March 5, and recorded for online viewing.

Spanning nearly three hours, it unfolds as a full-scale National Green Tribunal (NGT) hearing, staying true to all NGT protocols. Following from a previous project in a courtroom setting, Landscape as Evidence: Artist as Witness, which took the form of a commission of inquiry looking into the River Linking Project, this play furthers Chaudhari’s longstanding engagement with the staged hearing as a format for performance.

Every year, farmers in Punjab and Haryana burn crop stubble to prepare fields for the rabi crop. The smoke from these fires, combined with industrial and vehicular pollution, sends Delhi’s already poor air quality into a toxic downward spiral.

Efforts have been made to curb pollution and mechanise the stubble burning process, but despite a few subsidies, the cost of fuel and supplementary equipment like tractors renders such technology inaccessible to small and marginal farmers. While the spotlight is often on health issues faced by Delhi residents during the stubble-burning season, those in the immediate vicinity of these areas also contend with the effects of toxic air.

In the Matter Re: Rights of Nature stages a hearing with practising lawyers, a panel of retired judges, expert subject witnesses, including an economist and policy adviser, and artists who work in the areas of agriculture and ecology. All the “performers” play roles based on their work and practice outside the courtroom.

Scripted hearing

Unlike a regular hearing, where a single witness testimony may run to days, weeks or months, here, the performers developed and scripted the points they would make, in conversation with Chaudhari, in a nod to the staged format and audience involvement.

The staged hearing departs from usual judicial conventions by inviting artists to testify as “witnesses”. Conventionally, a “witness” is someone with first-hand knowledge of the scenario in question, or an expert who can speak to the technical minutiae of a situation. Positioning artists as witnesses gave an opportunity to weigh how artistic methods could be considered forensic, said Chaudhari, who is the director and dramaturg of the piece, adding, “The broader interest is in thinking about what kind of knowledge art produces, the process by which it is produced, and the meanings and ramifications [it holds] for the outside world.”

The judges hear from the artist duo Thukral and Tagra, who appear as witnesses. | Photo Credit: Khoj International Artists’ Association

For instance, when artist and farmer Shweta Bhattad takes the stand, she talks about farming practices in her village, and the artistic work that emerges from this. She lives in Paradsinga, a village on the border of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, a short distance from Vidarbha, a region that is notorious for its high incidence of farmer suicides.

Bhattad is a founder member of the Gram Art Project, a group of farmers, artists, women and makers. In response to questions by the lawyer Harish Mehla, she speaks about multi-cropping practices in Paradsinga, where crops offset each other and balance the nutrients they consume from the soil.

Don’t you generate stubble in the course of your farming, the lawyer Manmohan Lal Sarin, appearing on behalf of the farmers, asks Bhattad, who explains that the crops are planned in a manner that allows people in the village to fill their stomachs, share their produce with others, process the produce, including stubble, to create other products, and to feed their animals.

Bhattad draws attention to the apron she is wearing, made from farm waste, which members of the Gram Art Project decided she would wear at the hearing. In that one gesture, she demonstrates the group’s networked practice of art and agriculture, and their processes of collective decision-making.

Throughout her testimony, she uses the plural gender-neutral pronoun hum (we), speaking in the collective sense of the relationships between humans and their ecology. A tree with a beehive on it would always be left standing, she says. If humans really needed to cut it down, they would shake the tree over several weeks and months to let the bees know that a change was on the horizon. She speaks of other living beings in the farm’s landscape with emotion and belonging, acknowledging their need for food, water, and shelter.

Highlights

• In the matter Re: Rights of Nature is a staged hearing that addresses the links between air pollution in Delhi NCR and the agricultural practice of stubble burning in the neighbouring States of Punjab and Haryana.
• The performance was staged at Chandigarh’s Open Hand monument on March 5, 2023, and recorded for online viewing.
• It unfolds as a full-scale National Green Tribunal (NGT) hearing, staying true to all the protocols and conventions of the NGT.

Nature as a person

Bhattad’s narration of these attempts at finding and maintaining an ecological balance resonates with the Rights of Nature doctrine, where an ecosystem is entitled to legal personhood status, allowing it to defend itself against harm in a court of law. Through the concept of personhood, nature is framed as an embodied entity, with the same rights and duties as humans. When someone threatens the integrity of its embodiment, it is then entitled to the same legal protections as humans.

There are issues with this approach because nature cannot be held liable in the same way as humans are. However, it does allow legal structures to acknowledge the agency of nature and specify measures to safeguard it.

Air pollution from stubble burning cannot be dissociated from the issues farmers face, as they struggle to build and maintain precarious relationships with nature and capitalist societies. In the matter... acknowledges the interests of several respondents, including the farmers’ union.

In “staging” a hearing with artist witnesses, the play uses a variety of speculative tools to demonstrate the facts of the case, including formats based in play, like board games. At one point in the hearing, lawyers and witnesses come together to play the board game Weeping Farm, devised by the artist witnesses on the stand, the duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra.

“I am a cultivator. My age is 41. I am sowing potatoes and have a family of seven. I am from Bihar,” lawyer Mannat Anand, appearing for the government, reads from a game card. The card she has chosen leaves her with a debt of Rs. 50,000, accrued by borrowing money from relatives and local money lenders, to cover her income deficit from farming. As lawyers and witnesses read their cards to the audience, their debts mount.

After one round, the judges decide that they have heard enough and halt the game, noting the similarities between Monopoly and Weeping Farm and acknowledging how stifling debt might force farmers to consider and resort to extreme measures like suicide.

A view of the audience at the Open Hand Monument in Chandigarh. | Photo Credit: Khoj International Artists’ Association

In the context of a staged hearing, is there a line between the legal and the performative? Is there room for feeling and emotion in the scope of the law? Arguments and statements made in a courtroom, in their desire to convince, in their flamboyance, are rooted in a performative impulse. Feeling can be a double-edged sword, Chaudhari admits. It is rooted in the personal and the emotional, yet, within the objective fabric of courtroom arguments, it can still be leveraged to appeal to the subjectivity of listeners, including the jury. “It works towards believability at some level,” she says.

How the hearing ends is anyone’s guess. The script accounts for what petitioners, witnesses, and lawyers might say. But its predictability does not extend to how the judges might rule. While the judges see the petition, their first encounter with all statements and arguments—with the script—is at the hearing itself.

They do not meet or engage with the other performers outside of the hearing. They are simultaneously participants and viewers; just like the audience, they watch the hearing unfold for the very first time, and deliver a ruling based on what they hear.

When the judges deliver a ruling, does that signify an end to the proceedings? Chaudhari doesn’t think so. She sees the staging as a means of refining the petition, a step on the way to testing it out in a real-life courtroom. “In a way, the performance is a rehearsal towards something broader. The final event is the submission to the actual NGT.”

The petition went through multiple rounds of review to strengthen it. In doing so, the creators did not just treat it as a performative script, but also considered what judicial resonance it might have as a petition, as one that addressed highly relevant issues of climate.

Ranjana Dave is an artist and writer. She is the editor of Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance (Tulika Books, 2021).