News of Week1

The week 1 began with a brief desciption of the play.The story is about:

Kholdo : Rehearsing Manto in times of gang rapes

About the writer :Saadat Hassan Manto  was a British Indian-bornPakistani short story writer of the Urdu language. He is best known for his short stories, "Bu" (Odor), "Khol Do" (Open It), "ThandaGosht" (Cold Meat), and "Toba Tek Singh". He was a prolific writer of Urdu short story.  He was a journalist, literary critic, screenplay writer, play writer, and a keen observer of the society in which he lived.  He is inarguably one of the most read authors in Urdu prose literature even today.  Manto’s stories are often criticized for sexuality in them, but as Manto himself had said “if you find my stories dirty, the society you are living is dirty.  With my stories, I expose only truth.”

About the story:

“Khol Do” is one of the most famous and controversial stories of Manto.  It is one of the masterpiece depicting the effects of violence during the partition of India on the people of the land.  But unlike many others, Manto does not see the perpetrators as Hindu or Muslim, Hindustanis or Pakistanis, he just sees and depicts them as human beings with all their wilderness and barbarity.

“Khol Do” is basically a story of a father ‘Sirajuddin’ who had to left India during the partition days.  Story starts with Sirajuddin finding himself on the railway platform of Mughalpura, Lahore.  After the dreadful journey from Amritsar to Lahore in which hundreds were killed and injured and lost and raped, he just lay down for hours on the platform of Mughalpura.  He wakes up from his unconsciousness only to find that his wife and daughter are not with him.  As he is still in daze, the image of his wife, about to die, with ripped open stomach comes in front of his eyes, just telling him to leave her alone and run away with Sakina, his daughter.  And then suddenly he realizes that Sakina is not with him, nowhere.

Shocked… to think of what would have happened to a girl of 17, who just hearing “Khol do” opens down her salwar in spontaneous reflex… shocked with the the capacity of Manto to see, perceive, and depict the truth as naked as it is… Shocked with the courage of a writer to write such a self-critical thing (those boys were on his side of the border)… And the government charged Saadat Hasan Manto for the charges of pornography…

We also had brief session like

• Daily workout exercises
• Use  of  facial expressions
• Rehearsing the script
• Technicalities about  stage activities