Theatre has always been a genre of resistance, says M.K. Raina
Before I Forget. One, he’s a keen observer and true to his craft as a veteran theatre director, actor and cultural activist, sets the scene like a stage.
Two, he has been witness to several tumultuous incidents in post-independent India: as a young boy in Srinagar, he witnessed the mass protests when the Moi-e-Muqqadas, or holy relic, was stolen from the Hazratbal shrine in 1963; and in 1985, post Operation Blue Star, he travelled with a film team to Punjab, visiting Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s family home in Rode and meeting his father in the Golden Temple in Amritsar (the film was never made). These observations make for an engrossing and vivid memoir, rich with detail and recollections that tend to tie into film or theatre—for instance, he compares seeing a bullet-riddled Fiat standing in the compound of Punjab Kesari newspaper office in 1985 with the scene from The Godfather where Sonny Corleone is showered with bullets in his car.
Raina, who has produced over 160 plays, including Kabira Khada Bazar Mein, Banbhatta ki Atmakatha and Pari Kukh and acted in art films such as 27 Down, Aaghat and New Delhi Times, believes theatre can be an agent of change. It is evident that this belief has driven his life.
He held workshops from 2005-12 in Akingam village in the Valley, which were instrumental in reviving the traditional folk drama of Kashmir called Bandh Pather—bandh means actor/performer and pather, to play—which had been moribund for a decade with militants calling it un-Islamic. He describes how in 2010, at Mudgaej village in Kashmir, thousands of people prevailed after some religious hardliners threatened violence if Badshah Lear (a Bandh Pather play based on Shakespeare’s King Lear), was performed.
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