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nupurdalmia · 9 years

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‘Jug Jug Jiyo’

Lead Actors Mita Vashisht and Dolly Ahluwalia [from left to right]

I saw a play last week that has been aptly described as a witty, dark comedy. Jug Jug Jiyo (Hindi) translates to 'may you live long and well'. There is something comforting about this title because it recalls the earnest blessing of our elders that most of us are so familiar with. The play begins on a cozy note with the cheesy banter of a young couple - Sia and Siraj - evidently in love, debating the future of their pre-marital romance. However, the audience is soon jerked out of its comfort zone with the ironic realization that the play actually means to celebrate life by highlighting its deliberate loss through rampant feticide and infanticide.

Dolly Ahluwalia, the doting and imposing Punjabi mother obsessed with her "Puttar", delivers a winning performance with her usual exuberance and candor, nuanced by the skeletons of her past. I quickly wrote her off as a traditional, narrow-minded Punjabi woman who's only claim to fame is to be the mother of a boy but much like the title, the play surprises you with unexpected complexities that emerge from its simplicity - this in fact is the biggest triumph of the play.

Mita Vashisht portrays a new age single-mother who runs an NGO, complete with a characteristic intellectual arrogance. In the play she makes the hard decision to give up her education and life in the big city to raise an unplanned daughter as a single-mother. The clincher is that she lies to her daughter, claiming to be a divorcee, to make life easier on them in a society where single mothers are either scorned or sympathized with in equal parts.

The harmless note on which the play begins is like the calm before a storm, as a lifetime of lies slowly begin to unravel on this very fateful night - Mita is forced to come clean about her fictional husband and the unknown identity of Sia's father; Dolly, initially full of judgement and shade, reveals a whopping 10 forced abortions of unborn girls until she could no longer have children. Her husband then proceeds to buy, yes purchase, a 16 year old surrogate mother who bears him twins. And thus Siraj is born, devoid of any DNA from Dolly, and the girl is mercilessly drowned in a pot of boiling milk as she watches on helplessly. This apparently was the limit of her tolerance as she finally musters up the courage to get her husband arrested and run away with his son.

While the play ends on the happy note of familial reconciliation and personal atonement for Dolly, it left my mind in a maze of social conundrums. For me, this is not just a feminist agenda; I am also interested in the issues of motive, justice, and most importantly, how entire societies come to accept seemingly illogical and immoral traditions.

At one point, Dolly explains that had she not abducted Siraj while running away, he was likely to grow up to be the same ruthless and entitled misogynist that his father was. While it is obvious that our surroundings / backgrounds shape (at least in part) our moral fibre, it almost seems to implicate the influencers of our prospective crimes and take responsibility away from the criminal. This is mostly relevant to moral offenses that are accepted or condoned in societies. Political theorist, Hannah Arendt, discusses this problem of judgement with respect to crimes committed in the Holocaust. She deliberates whether the same laws can be applied to someone who is committing 'legal' crimes, i.e. carrying out orders in the Nazis' case and following the law of the land in this case. It leaves you wondering where the lines can be blurred between choice and desperation / duty / ideology.

The imbalance between man and woman, unavoidable in physical strength and childbirth, is made worse in India by abject poverty / impending dowry / and cultural / socioeconomic factors that make the girl child a liability (ironic in a country where girls are said to be avatars of Laxmi - the Goddess of wealth). The crux of the problem is that crimes against the girl child (and other social atrocities) are often committed under the veneer of helplessness. Our criminals are humanized in the form of a farmer who hasn't received his subsidy in a year of drought or a construction worker without a day's education and years worth of debt. Dowry, which originated as a way for parents to give gifts to the bride when she is leaving their home, is too often used as an instrument to oppress women and manipulate the parents of a girl. To ask for meaningful change is to ask for a cultural shift that extends to every aspect of rural and political India and rests on the shoulders not only of education but also of progressiveness from the children of these criminals.

These complexities may be extraneous for some that view these horrors in black and white but many of those people are unwitting criminals themselves, for hiding behind their fancy degrees and propagating the anti-muslim sentiment or for turning a blind-eye to thieveries of that faithful servant who has a demanding family. My point is that there are hordes of delinquents all around us who are in some way contributing to crimes against humanity but are impossible to incriminate.

So where does this stop? Why are some people able to see more clearly than others? While many commit crimes in the throes of economic desperation, why do other perfectly comfortable individuals harbor distinctions or deem cultural traditions to be exempt from moral judgement? My father recently gave me an interesting theory about this - he said that oftentimes an "underdog" is able to think differently - to think for himself and be rational. Maybe a person who has at some point been a misfit in a family / society / school / office space is able look beyond the accepted truths, or at least question why things are the way they are because he doesn't like the existing state of affairs. Do these lofty issues then (at least in part) boil down to an egotistical need for social security? Are the stronger members of society naturally prone to hide behind the status-quo and fear the unknown, even at the cost of a greater good?

I found a quote by Dolly saying "I want every single person to be uncomfortable after seeing this play. They should be forced to think about the future". Uncomfortable we were, and think we did - mission accomplished, Dolly!

#theatre #review #jugjugjiyo #feminism #girl child

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