Living in Character

Abstract

Through storytelling, play, and journals, Nagar examines the learning processes that unfolded during the six month long process of making Hansa, Karo Puratan Baat, a play based on a collective reinterpretation of Munshi Premchand's short story, 'Kafan.' The twenty people who came together to create Hansa are migrants from seven states of India who now work in Mumbai as domestic workers or as aspiring or underemployed film actors ("strugglers"). In the process of wrestling with sociopolitical, geographical, and linguistic hierarchies, these actors articulate a situated solidarity with the worldviews of those who are dismissed as rural, Dalit, uneducated, and poor. They reimagine the aesthetics and ethics of artistry through an embodied immersion in the politics of casteism, communalism, patriarchy, uneven development, and poverty in India.