Stree Parvam opens with Kunti and Gandhari witnessing the aftermath of the Kurukshetra war – a haunting tableau of bodies lying around the battlefield. Eerie howls of wolves rip through the audience. For the next 60 minutes, the performers on and off stage deftly guide the audience into a realm filled with women’s loss, grief and resounding hope as they recover from the devastation wrought by war. From the ancient battlefields of Kurukshetra elaborated on in the Mahabharata to the modern wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Eelam, the play depicts women’s suffering, their poignant efforts in confronting the truth, and their views about war.
Stree Parvam (The Women) is a new production from Marapachi, a renowned Tamil theatre group headed by well-known theatre artist and performing arts academic A. Mangai. Stree Parva is the 11th of the 18 cantos in the epic Mahabharata and illustrates the pain experienced by women from the war and its losses.
The play reinterprets the Mahabharata text from a contemporary feminist perspective. Kunti, Gandhari, Drapaudi, and her widowed daughter Duhsala are overwhelmed and lament the deaths of their sons and husbands. They adorn a long white cloth, which often symbolises lost lives, earth and land – that one handful of earth we want to store in our memory to keep us grounded.
During the entirety of the production, the cloth takes various shapes and forms in the hands of the performers, casting shadows that heighten the intended meaning of the performance. The line-drawings of Trotsky Marudu contextualise the anguish of the women further by connecting the wars of the unknown lands to the one we had known and remembered.
Departing from the viewpoints of victory vs loss and good vs evil and the digression that comes with them, Mangai’s text draws us into the context. The wars seem like one long, haunting sequence of death, quite similar to the long white cloth that transforms on the stage, marked by the rise and fall of empires and democracies.
The play draws attention to the thousands of deaths that are typically reported as numbers and then immortalised as mere statistics. A long sequence in the play, where nothing but the word ‘ethanai (how many)’ is repeated, represents the lives lost through all the years of conflict; images and sketches of the scenes from Ukraine and Palestine are superimposed, humanising the conflict that exists as we speak of it. Gandhari reflects on the innumerable moments where she attempted to avert the Kurukshetra war, which has become synonymous with bloodshed.
A scene from the play. Photo: Special arrangement
The narrative then focuses on the perspective of common folk and evokes the meaninglessness of wars. When a dream sequence begins, a very short film from a Palestinian artist, Tara Harkim, plays in the background and serves as both a reflection of their happy pasts and a hopeful future. Mangai later said she requested Tara to collaborate. When she sent her a rehearsal video of the dream sequence, she provided her reference music and made the film. The score was set to tune in Tamil music for the text.
The play, during a moment of wakeful trance, depicts an ideal – a world without war where arms and weapons will be locked up in a museum. It is impossible not to think of the Flower Power photograph from 1967, a significant moment from the massive demonstration against the Vietnam War.
Later, in a flash of unexpected horror, Ashwathama enters the scene where the common folk had gone to sleep. He unleashes his violence and stands upon the heaps of dead bodies he has massacred. Then a loud roar of airplane engines fills the space, evoking a haunting parallel to the current war in Gaza, where thousands of innocent people were killed in their sleep. It also reminds us of the jarring reality where, unperturbed by the horrors of war, the majority of the world has attuned itself to the mundane act of having to swipe through images and news of death and continue with regular life – a stark reminder of the normalisation of tragedy and death.
There is no comeuppance for people other than death and angst. The staggering number of battle casualties, as reported by Yudhishthira to Dhritarashtra, is projected on the screen, and the number is repeated. It gets more unbearable with each repetition.
The narrative speaks directly to the audience and calls for discussion, reporting and humanising these conflicts, like the recent ones in Ukraine and Palestine. Mangai has worked with Yana Salakhova from Ukraine, a practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed, to invite her perspective on the war. She had incorporated verses from the works of the Palestinian poet Rafaat Alreer and Sri Lankan Tamil poets Puduvai Rathnadurai and Nuhman.
A poster for the play. Photo: Special arrangement
In the final moments of the play, Gandhari and Kunti perform their funeral rites, accepting their sorrow and reclaiming their lives from destruction, loss and survivor’s guilt. Kunti expresses her undeclared love for Karna, the tragic hero.
The question that the play tries to evoke is voiced out as a rap. It also injects much-needed positivity, highlighting that “the next generations will live and there is an end to the war.”.
The production is infused with interesting tech; the background and foreground projections, with the lights, add more layers and meanings to the set-up and performance. The music score shifts and aids in the different moods, infused with tunes associated with koothu, Arabic rhythms and rap.
Two moments linger long after the performance is over.
One of the characters asks, “We are ordinary people with no relation to governance or authority. Why should we be affected by the war?”
Kunti and Gandhari hug in an attempt to purge their emotions. A long-awaited resolution to pull each other out of their despair and instil hope.
The play will be staged at the Museum Theatre, Chennai, on April 13 as part of the ‘Dhamma Theatre Festival’, an extension of the Vaanam Art Festival.
Muralidharan K. is a Chennai-based writer. He writes and translates fiction in Tamil and English. He surtitles/subtitles for feature films and plays (theatre). He works full-time as a learning consultant for an MNC.
