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Lillete Dubey’s 30
Days in September, recently staged in Chandigarh, is meant to
shock people into an awareness of child sex abuse and the victim’s
trauma. Aditi Tandon reports
PEDOPHILIA and incest are not new entrants to the world of sexual variants but they have certainly acquired newer, graver dimensions that demand urgent social response. Uncomfortable though it may sound, 70 per percent of urban Indian women have, in some manner or the other, been subjected to sexual abuse as children. What is worse is that the aberration, contrary to what it appears, cuts across all sections of society, sparing no one whatsoever. Some years ago when RAHI (Recovery and Healing from Incest), a Delhi based NGO working with abused children in the middle and upper middle class sections commissioned Mahesh Dattani to write a play about the prevalence of incest in India, Dattani was wary for many reasons. "Who would produce a play like that," he mused, until of course, his long-time associate Lillete Dubey accepted the challenge, and took Dattani’s thought-provoking, penetrative references to people across the country. Later the play, titled 30 Days in September travelled all over the world, evoking deepest disdain for the child abuser. And irrespective of where it went (from Malaysia to the USA), it opened to full houses for the sheer audacity of its content. Even as the play was presented for the 77th time in Chandigarh last week, courtesy The Tribune and the Durga Das Foundation, the responses remained overwhelming as always. The strain common to every reaction was that of "shock". Lillete Dubey told us why. "It would be weird if anyone were to say that he or she enjoyed the play or liked it. The play is meant to shock people, to bring them close to brutal realities of life and tell them what sexual abuse means to a tender mind. It leaves the child devastated, to say the least. She mistakes the sexual act as an affirmation of love whereas it is anything but that." Dattani worked on 12 case histories before he wrote the play. He found a similarity in every case. The abuser was always the good uncle or the cousin who took the child out for an ice cream, consoled her when she had just been scolded by her father, took her for a long drive in the car. In short, he was the closest to the child. Enacting sordid stories on stage was not easy for Lillete or others in the production. Lillete, as a director, began by reading RAHI’s incredibly research book on incest, titled The House I Grew Up in. The book, published by RAHI, consists of several case histories – from that of a 19-year-old girl who recounts the horrors of child abuse to that of an "abused," and now-famous Bengali actress, who has not been identified in the book. The play features Lillete Dubey in the role of a mother, who has been abused as a child; Neha Dubey in the role of Mala, the young victim, Joy Sengupta in the role of Mala’s love interest and Amar Talwar in the role of the child abuser. About the challenge of enactment, Lillete says, "Sexual abuse of a child is something you can’t define. It has so many different layers that only years of psychoanalysis can help sort things out. As a director, I was stung by the boldness of the script. I trusted Dattani completely because he is an earnest, responsible writer who can make his point without being offensive. That’s what he has achieved by way of this play. We struggled and finally managed to educate parents with theatre as our tool." The production is powerful in many ways though sometimes one feels the abuser has not been castigated in the manner he should have been. The victim, played by Neha Dubey (Lillete’s daughter) fails to concentrate her anger on her uncle, played by Amar Talwar in this case. She shields him from social backlash, until of course she finds him guilty of betrayal. As she tells, "I did not judge the character I was playing. That made things easier for me. As a student of psychology, I was tolerant towards the world as not being black and white. I entered the character of Mala with great respect. Here was a child for whom sexual intercourse with her uncle was an approval of his love for her. As she grows up, she seeks sexual liaisons with old men because she needs the affirmation that she exists. She suffers because she still loves her abuser in the subconscious." It takes the victim
years of anguish to digest the fact that the trust bonds her abuser
built have long been crushed. As the realisation dawns, she admits to
her sickness and is willing to be treated for it. For the first time
in life, she manages to focus her anger where it belongs – on her
uncle who conveniently forced her and her mother’s life into
darkness. |
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