Remembering Safdar Hashmi in today's India

Ziaul Hasan and Safdar Hashmi belonged to different generations and possibly different traditions of Indian communism. Safdar’s party was sworn to Stalinism. Zia was an admirer of Rosa Luxemburg. Safdar was fatally assaulted on New Year’s Day in 1989 while performing a street play for mill workers near Delhi. He died the following day in hospital, a young spirited and much loved Marxist whose life was absurdly snuffed out at 35. Zia sahab must have been in his early 80s. I imagine when he passed away in 1993 in harness as one of India’s most respected journalists. He helped establish the pro-left Link magazine and Patriot, the publishing house that would give India many of its best journalists.

I am not sure if Safdar and Zia ever met but they both worked and fought for an egalitarian and just society in South Asia. For so many in Delhi, New Year’s Day means remembering Safdar Hashmi. The young rebel was bludgeoned in Sahibabad by the factory’s henchmen who apparently owed allegiance to the then ruling Congress Party. The Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat) organises an annual cultural jamboree on January 1. Some of India’s best dancers, singers, painters and film-makers gather under one roof every year to celebrate Safdar. The late Allan Faqir was an early participant from Pakistan.

New Year’s Day is when young men and women are usually recovering from the excesses of the previous night’s revelry. Safdar and his dedicated team were a different kettle of fish as driven partisans often are. They were up early to catch the bus to the designated factory in Sahibabad. He was an unassuming man of many talents. He could quickly write and direct street plays in which he also acted with flair, and he was a poet who could also draw and write riveting stories for children.

Safdar would easily make friends and had a natural gift for engaging strangers in political conversation, a talent that may have helped him to set up the Jana Natya Manch (Janam, People’s Theatre Front) in 1973. The new group owed allegiance to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). Janam was a critique as well as a rival of the rusty but still legendary Indian People’s Theatre Association, or IPTA, which has remained with (or has perhaps clung to the memories of) the original Communist Party of India or CPI.

I did several street plays with the group and set up a Janam unit in the industrial city of Kanpur. In a proscenium play I got a role with lots of memorable expletives thrown in against the ruling establishment. Utpal Dutt wrote Ebaar Rajar Pala (It’s the turn of the king) as a critique of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. In one scene in a performance at Delhi’s Triveni open-air theatre, renowned actor N.K. Sharma was supposed to shoot me. A firecracker was synchronised to go off with the imagined sound of Sharma’s fake pistol. Tch tch tch, Sharma hissed, pointing the gun at me. But the cracker refused to come alive. Tch tch tch. Finally, I dropped dead anyway. As the lights faded for the next scene, there was a loud boom from backstage, quite disproportionate to the agreed sound of the fake pistol.

I remember we were huddled all day and the following morning at the hospital, hopelessly waiting for a miracle. But Safdar had suffered severe head injuries and could not be saved. Between the tears and rage and shock, his supporters gathered at the Sangeet Natak Akademi grounds. I remember a particularly powerful speech by Ebrahim Alkazi, India’s undisputed theatre guru, and I think this exhortation was partly responsible for the setting up of Sahmat.

An intractable challenge liberals and leftists face perennially is that their great ability to think brilliantly and rationally is accompanied by an absence of patience with a contesting view. Josh Malihabadi had perhaps offered useful advice to the habitually fractious communists when he wrote: “Ek din keh lijiye jo kuch hai dil mein aapke/Ek din sun lijiye jo kuch hamarey dil mein hai (Take your time and say everything you want to say to me/Then, if you like, lend me your ear, as I have something important to share with you too).

I’m not sure about the actual cause, but their intellectual brilliance and possible lack of patience with each other could be why Mala Hashmi, Safdar’s wife and Shabnam Hashmi, Safdar’s sister, are today running separate outfits in his memory. Mala runs the old Janam. Shabnam heads a rights-based group called Anhad. And there is Sahmat. I wonder where Safdar would find himself in this maze of competing talent. Janam broke away from IPTA, and then it mutated into three more groups.

As Ziaul Hasan observed in his columns for the Patriot, there was trouble all round within the communist ranks spawned by the leadership of the parties. There was a great desire within the CPI(M) to crush the Congress. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency didn’t help. But the boot today is on the other foot. Few communists have a cogent plan to defeat the mortal threat from the Hindu right. The communists had put up candidates against Arvind Kejriwal who brought Narendra Modi to heel. They put up candidates against the anti-BJP coalition in Bihar. They can’t seem to forget their animosity towards the West Bengal government though it is resolutely challenging the Modi regime. Goons linked to the Congress killed Safdar. Goons linked to the Hindutva establishment have been destroying everything that Sahmat, Jana Natya Manch and Anhad stand for. Hindutva threw out artist M.F. Husain from the country. The Congress government could not bring him back. India is in trouble and the remedy is buffeting about in the bickering of its most intellectually gifted citizens.