Fragments of a life in theatre: M.K. Raina’s memoir of Kashmir and beyond

The theatre veteran offers a left-liberal Kashmiri Pandit’s perspective on theatre and activism, but leaves gaps in the broader Kashmiri narrative.

M.K. Raina. | Photo Credit: SANDEEP SAXENA

M.K. Raina is a veteran Indian theatre actor and director. An alumnus of the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi, he has received numerous awards and accolades for his contributions to Indian theatre, and has been a visiting director at the NSD, University of Hyderabad, IIT Hyderabad, and IIT Bhilai. Before I forget portrays various facets of his life and work as an artist, activist, philanthropist, and displaced Kashmiri Pandit.

Raina calls himself “the child of India’s socialism”. The memoir opens with his reminiscences of growing up in the working-class neighbourhood of Sheetal Nath Sathu in Srinagar, which had a mixed population of Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims. He writes: “The Pandits were mostly educated and were doctors, teachers, engineers, clerks and court employees. The Muslims were tangawallas, tailors, milkmen, small contractors and manual labourers.” While this sentence reflects the stark social binaries imbibed in his narrative memory, compartmentalising one social group from a perceived lower one, the book does not go on to historicise how these economic differences may have come about between the two communities.

Before I Forget: A Memoir

By M.K. Raina

Vintage Books

Pages: 424

Price:Rs. 999

The opening chapters are full of crucial political events that Raina witnessed in his growing-up years. These include the dismissal of Sheikh Abdullah as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir in 1953, the visit of Russian envoys Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin to Srinagar, the theft of the moi-muqadas (a holy relic believed to be a strand from the beard of Prophet Muhammad) at the Hazratbal shrine and the return of Sheikh Abdullah in 1964. The description of these events is detailed and lucid, and shot through with great emotion and anticipation.

In particular, Raina narrates how the Pandits organised marches in solidarity with the Muslims, demanding the return of the moi-muqadas, and how he himself led one such march: “We were shouting slogans like Marenge ek saath, jiyenge ek saath (We will die together, we will live together), Moi-muqadas pak ko wapas karo aye zalimon (Return the moi-muqadas to us, O tormentors); and Hindu Muslim ittehad, zindabad, zindabad (Long live the union of Hindus and Muslims)!” The lines evoke a bygone camaraderie among the Kashmiri people that made communal attitudes irrelevant. Even those who may have had prejudices would have been shy of displaying them openly since there was no room or social sanction for it.

Before I Forget by M. K. Raina | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Raina’s early years also give us a glimpse of the Pandit cultural space of the 1950s. In school, he participated in music classes, sangeet mehfils and plays. Later he was part of the Young Writers Forum, where well-known Kashmiri poets and writers such as Amin Kamil, Akhtar Mohiuddin, Ali Mohammad Lone, Rehman Rahi, and Dinanath Nadim presided over meetings. He also participated in theatre productions in Kashmir Kala Kendra. At NSD, he studied theatre alongside stalwarts such as Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi.

Raina, who went on to spend a large part of his life in Delhi, devotes a chapter to recounting his experience of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. The assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, and the state-sanctioned violence against the Sikh community that followed, marked a turning point in Indian politics. As someone who was actively involved with rehabilitation of the riot victims, Raina describes how it was civil society that came to the aid of the Sikh community; nobody from the government showed up. The book also documents Raina’s meetings with the family of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who led the Khalistan movement, as well as the survivors of state-sponsored attacks and Khalistani ideologues. This chapter is however marred by repetitions which make for tedious reading.

SAHMAT and cultural resistance

Safdar Hashmi, the founder of the Jana Natya Manch who was murdered in 1989 while performing the street play, Halla Bol, was a close associate of Raina’s. In fact, it was Raina and his friends who founded the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in his memory and shaped it into a unique left-liberal cultural space. SAHMAT employed all forms of the arts to celebrate cultural resistance in a growing atmosphere of intolerance. After L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra in 1990, which resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and laid the foundation for the Ram mandir movement in Ayodhya, SAHMAT actively campaigned against the communal forces by publishing fact sheets about the excesses of the RSS. Artists and intellectuals came together to perform concerts against polarisation all over India, one such being the Mukta Naad concert on the banks of River Sarayu in Ayodhya itself.

A substantial part of the book deals with the rehabilitation of artists in conflict-hit Kashmir. Theatre is built from people’s stories and struggles. No theatre can happen in a vacuum; its main partners are the audience, the general public, for whom it is performed. Working in tandem with local bureaucrats, Raina organised several theatre training workshops on behalf of the NSD in Kashmir from 2000 onwards. He describes at length the difficulties he faced in bringing together local artists, students, and teachers together at a time when educational institutions had been shut down and the “oppressive gaze of the security personnel” had exhausted the Kashmiri psyche.

A scene from Raina’s play ‘Badshah Pather’ staged at Kalakshetra Foundation, Chennai, in 2013. | Photo Credit: M. KARUNAKARAN

In the later chapters, Raina discusses Bhand Pather, the traditional people’s theatre of the Kashmir valley and how he worked closely with local artists such as Mohammad Ameen Bhagat and Ghulam Rasool Bhagat to reintroduce this folk art formin Kashmir, digging into whatever material was available. The success of his training workshops led to introduction of Bhand Pather to artists across the length of mainland India, with Kashmiri performers playing in the Bharat Rang Mahotsav in New Delhi, theatre festivals in Chennai, and literary festivals in Pune and Goa.

Lost opportunity

While one must respect Raina’s emotions as he writes about the insurgency in Kashmir, Before I forget fails dismally at portraying the political events of Kashmir as would have been expected of someone who calls himself “a child of India’s socialism”. There is no historical context and no reference to the social factors that led to the rupture point in Kashmiri politics in the early 1990s. The representation of people’s struggles and sufferings is often very skewed, with the only point of discussion being the difficulties of artists and the Kashmiri Pandit community, conveniently ignoring what Kashmiri Muslims had to face at the hands of various agencies. At times, there is complete invisibilisation and other times, a grotesque generalisation and misrepresentation.

Raina mentions Kashmiri Muslims only in passing, mostly as aberrations—the driver, the flute-maker, a random chacha on the street—ignoring the fact that conflict affected their lives the most, in terms of the sheer number of lives lost. While the book is full of conversations and interviews with displaced Pandits and Sikhs, the only instance where he interviews (with subtle appreciative undertones) a Kashmiri Muslim is with a member of the Ikhwan force that was notorious for its human rights abuses against the local Muslim population. Even as Raina writes about organising the rehabilitation of children whose parents had suffered at the hands of militants in Kashmir, he completely sidelines hundreds of other children, orphans and half-orphans, who lost their kin to the violence orchestrated by various agencies.

M.K. Raina comes from a generation that witnessed key historical events that redefined the politics of modern India. Therefore his memoir could have been a vital document from the perspective of a left-leaning Kashmiri Pandit, offering the reader an alternate understanding of what has been recorded in official history. Alas, its complete nonchalance to the usage of neutral terminologies makes the book a lost opportunity. Whether it stands the test of narration and recapitulation needs to be appraised by each reader on a personal scale of intellectual veracity.

Khawar Khan Achakzai is a doctor and researcher with a specialisation in Internal Medicine. He is a student of Kashmir history, philosophy, and postcolonialism, with works published in various local and international magazines. He is the founder of Aagosh, a forum that is active against child sexual abuse in Kashmir.