March 11 – Koramangala Kannada & Tamil School, Marga Community Hall, Bengaluru

Everything about this show was the heart of the Mobile Girls Koottam. The women who came for it from the community were Tamil, in different lines of work – like domestic labour, beauticians, and housework. There were some social activists and artists who had also joined the audience. 

The hall was hot under the tin roof. We were getting dehydrated through the show. It did not make sense only to give tea. Sometimes, we will have to give juice or buttermilk. We had to navigate how to move differently through the audience. We had to improvise with minds that were switching off. Yes, we finished the show. The songs were on point. The laughs were shared. The questions were empowering. 

One of the most important conversations that happened was how the agency of a working woman changes after marriage. During the research, Madhu and I had also talked to married women, some of whom who had become the sole breadwinners and parents in negotiating these agencies. The house in Kanchipuram, however, was of single women or women amidst their love stories still negotiating this. 

Satya who dreams of becoming a police woman, considering the factory job as one of her many stepping stones, is constantly negotiating with a lover who wants to run away with her. It is the job itself that gives the man the courage to ask for this. They are probably capable of taking care of themselves, until a rumour of the factory bosses landing up from Finland hits them. He gets angstier when the factory is going to shut down. She is not in a mind space where she wants to give up her dreams for the sake of her love. But, yes this is pre-marriage. What happens post marriage? 

There were many married women working in that factory and where was their voice going to come from. As time goes, I also believe not every voice has to come from within the play, but we have to build frameworks for these voices to come through from the audience experiencing this with us and somehow this dialogue has to become the play. Over these four shows, I came to be very convinced that I do not want feedback at the end of the shows. There has something more organic that we can create. 

We also had a very weird conversation after the show. This was just pure social activism and artistic feedback. I was told that the musicality of the play was very different from the usual street plays and that the play exceeded their expectations of what it could be. As long as we are exceeding expectations, I have no qualms about it. And in case there are disappointments, I am only curious to understand why. However, the idea of calling The Mobile Girls Koottam a street play is not sitting well with me, for it is both a misunderstanding of the street play form and this form, which is trying to take pieces from all kinds of theatre, kind of a Jeet Kune Do theatre. Also, if labour protest is type-casted into a certain tonality, the lived experience disappears behind this.

There is a certain nuance to the history of this and over my notes in the next few months I will try to tackle this aspect of the artistic practice and maybe which schools of theatre one can tabulate the processes of The Mobile Girls Koottam into. 

The most beautiful takeaway from the show is that one of the leading members of the Marga collective, spoke to me about how making “home” a space to not just access or experience or witness, but to dialogue with people’s lives opens up a new form of theatre for protests, and that this by itself could become a methodology. He said it would be lovely to have plays where we set it in houses where construction labourers and mineworkers live. The home becomes the space of the heart and humanity of this protest. 

As we walked back to the cars to head to the next show, I saw an old woman on the road selling raw mango. Once again, a Tamil family. The basti is full of Tamil families. I struck a conversation with her as she was curious where in Tamil Nadu I came from. Then, she told me how her family to work in the Kolar Gold Mines and stayed back. The geographies of how labour moves us around is the beginning point of Madhu’s research. 

Let us come back to the idea of work and productivity. We all have to survive. Most of us do not come from the privilege of having a history of economic support. Most of us in the artistic fields, especially the kinds of Maraa, Marga or MGK does not come with great economic support that feeds us all. We had beef biryani and meals at a beautician’s house amongst her equipment. She runs classes for the women in the community, providing skill-development as an access point to develop economically. The honest truth is that an artist would expect productivity and deliverables from every other industry. But, it is not always possible in art. It is not strictly confined through deadlines and deliverables alone. The commitment to it comes from somewhere inside and sometimes we have to be able to also be kind and not commit to it, even if we do not have the privilege to say that no. We have to be mad enough to go hungry and get the food elsewhere. 

How many of us work full time jobs elsewhere to make our art? How many of us are drawing loans and EMIs to make our art? How many mineworkers would have scribbled inside our mines? How many construction workers leave behind footprints in the cement? How has that old woman made an art of cutting the mango and spicing it with chillies? The art is created in that superfluous space around the demands of “productivity” from our life.