State board censors play, but Mallika says her voice won’t go unheard

The latest is about the censoring of her new play Unsuni, Unheard Voices, just a few days ago by the Gujarat Censor Board. The play premiered in Mumbai as part of the Prithvi Theatre Festival. 'The government in Gujarat is so afraid of debate that they will condemn any form of questioning as being anti-Indian,' says Sarabhai.

Sarabhai's play, a series of five monologues, has been culled from Harsh Mandar's book Unheard Voices. The stories narrated are those of a street child, a manual scavenger, a tribal whose land has been grabbed, a leper and the inspiring biography of Mallika Bi, the only Muslim woman who fought for justice, post the Bhagalpur massacre of 1989. After her family of 16 were killed, she was the only one who survived.

'They have censored portions where the scavenger woman talks of carrying excreta on her head and a song set to the tune of Dus Bahaane, titled Sau Sawal Karke,' says the danseuse-activist, lounging at a friend's house in Carmichael Road after an early-morning flight.

She was defiant about performing the play in its original form. 'Let them send me a notice,'she says.

The Bhagalpur incident is just one monologue in her new production, but the scars from the 2002 riots are still fresh in the minds of Gujarat's Muslims, says Sarabhai. I am attending the Indian Social Forum in Delhi next, and one of the debates is about what has happened to the Muslims in five years. I know upper-class Muslims who are still out of work. Women embroiders who were making Rs 80 a day, now consider themselves lucky.

At the Forum, the real characters from Mandar's book like Mallika Bi and Narayani amma, the scavenger, will be felicitated.

In 2003, when Sarabhai's group tried to stage Sayeed Alam's historical, Maulana Azad, at Ahmedabad's Darpana Academy, the play was banned by the Gujarat Censor Board.

Fortunately, her Rs 10-crore project with the Doordarshan to produce six daily hours of programming on women's employment, adolescent health and water has just been given a new lease of life, after being stalled last year. It is a project in three languages, Bengali, Gujarati and Urdu and would benefit the State, so we had approached the Planning Commission. 'But our CM referred to it as another instance of Modi-bashing and it was cancelled even after being approved,' she says. The ambitious 'television for change' venture titled Satya, will soon take off to counter what Sarabhai calls the repressiveness of Ekta Kapoor.

Also on the cards for Sarabhai is a cinematic version of Unsuni¦and the annual Vikram Sarabhai International Arts Festival slated in Mumbai in March next year.