AHMEDABAD: Le Mashale, a play in Hindi, directed and presented by Ojas S V and written by Civic Chandran, is based on the life and times of Irom Sharmila Chanu from Manipur.
Presented at the Layola Golden Jubilee Auditorium of St. Xavier's School on Wednesday night, it was introduced by Father Cedric Prakash saying "today's play is not about entertainment, but about reality and struggles of Manipur, and a powerful life".
In the next 40 minutes Ojas, the activist and powerful performer, used three torches, a square box, a blood-stained newspaper, and a multimedia screen behind her to present an extremely powerful and intense soliloquy about the long struggle of Sharmila in the form of an indefinite hunger strike against the brutality of the Indian Army in her state in the name of safeguarding the very people it has trampled for long.
The powerful tales in the multimedia format showing people getting killed in large numbers, women's rights violated, and youths tortured for no apparent reason left the audience gaping at the intensity and violence used by the
state machinery.
But it was Ojas's performance which completely soaked the audience in the tale of the solitary woman courageously fighting a violent system to highlight her people's rights and peace.
Fed forcefully by the state to keep her alive, Sharmila's body has lived on artificial food since 2000, but her true grit and courage has made an atrocious regime uncomfortable while facing questions from the world.
The play also touches on the violent rape and killing of Manorama by Indian Army personnel, and the statewide protests by Manipuri women who presented themselves naked in front of the Army headquarters, a machinery that termed Manorama as nothing else but "a vagina and two lumps of flesh".
Le Mashale is about commitment to justice, peace and rights. It is also a question, pertinently and pointedly asked to a nation, which once upon a time had protested against the British Rowlett Act, but which has blindly allowed the same barbarism to perpetrate in the form of the Armed Forces Special Power Act in a part of its own. Le Mashale is a play which can arouse a sensitive world to state-run terror, and can do justice to the sacrifice of Sharmila.