“Safdar’s killing had touched a raw nerve in the country”—revisiting the murder of a playwright and activist

Courtesy Leftword Books
01 January, 2020

The activist and playwright Safdar Hashmi was 34 years old when he was brutally injured, on 1 January 1989, while performing a street play in Delhi with Jana Natya Manch, often referred to as Janam, the theatre group he led. The troupe had gathered to perform in the neighbourhood of Jhandapur, Sahibabad, and was attacked, allegedly by a group led by Mukesh Sharma, an independent Congress-backed candidate contesting municipal elections at the time. A labourer named Ram Bahadur, who was a resident of the area, died on the spot. Hashmi succumbed to serious injuries the following night. Around fifteen thousand people attended his funeral procession.

In his new book, Halla Bol: The death and life of Safdar Hashmi, his colleague and friend Sudhanva Deshpande, who is a Delhi-based theatre director and actor, as well as the managing editor of LeftWord Books, chronicles the moments leading up to the attack and the aftermath, in which Hashmi’s death galvanised widespread protest around the country. This excerpt focusses on Janam’s electrifying performance of the play Halla Bol, led by Moloyashree—Hashmi’s partner—on 4 January 1989.

2 January 1989: Mala

Early in the morning on 2 January, Mala went home. She was back at the hospital by nine. She knew Safdar was not going to survive. This was confirmed by the senior doctor, probably the head of neurology, who spoke to her. She remembers him being a calm and balanced person. He said the chances of survival were extremely slim, but they were trying to do everything they could. Given the nature and extent of the injuries, surgery was ruled out. If the family wanted to employ any other treatment, he said, he would cooperate fully. Mala said no.

Through the day, a large number of people came to the hospital, some of whom met Mala. She remembers Buta Singh being driven away. She also remembers that many Doordarshan employees visited the hospital. Safdar had befriended them when he had worked on a number of short documentaries a few years ago. Artists kept streaming in. She remembers Bhisham Sahni, as well as Ebrahim Alkazi, who came in the evening. Sohail arrived from Trivandrum late in the evening, with CPI (M) Delhi Secretary Jogendra Sharma. 

The day was spent waiting. Shabnam and Shehla, Safdar’s sisters, arranged for food. At one point, Ammaji and Mala were allowed inside the ICU, and they saw Safdar from a distance. He was on a ventilator.

The previous day, since Janam was to do three performances spread through the day, Mala was carrying the manuscript of a school textbook she was writing, hoping to find some time between the shows to work on it. Now she wondered if she’d ever get it back. She did, later that day, when she went to the Party office. After Safdar was pronounced dead, Mala waited for the eye donation procedure to be completed before going home. She had wanted the organs donated and the body given for medical research, but there were legal hurdles. The post-mortem report noted what we saw when we carried him to the hospital, that there was bleeding from his ears, nose, and throat. It said that he had sustained “deep lacerated wounds” on the scalp and forehead. He had been “beaten on the head at least 20 times with iron rods.” 

3 January 1989: The Funeral Procession

A large crowd had started building up even before Safdar’s body arrived at the Party office in VP House that morning. By the time it was kept in a pandal, draped in a red flag, for people to pay their respects, the crowd had swelled to a few thousand. Over the soundtrack of my memory, I can hear only two things from that morning. Slogans and wailing. Both rent the air, piercing the sky. I was one of the Red Volunteers that day. Standing vigil next to the body, wearing an ill-fitting red shirt I had been given at the Party office, looking at hundreds of people file past. Many opposition leaders, including VP Singh, who was to become prime minister later that year, came to pay their respects. The only parties that were unrepresented were the Congress and the BJP. The Congress denied that the attackers had anything to do with them. A line of volunteers, the men wearing red shirts and the women wearing white sarees with red borders, carrying red flags at half mast, led the funeral procession. The tempo carrying Safdar’s body followed. Sohail, MK Raina, Bhisham Sahni, Mala, her father and Ammaji were on the tempo. Also on the tempo were Prakash Karat, Jogendra Sharma and PMS (“Pushi”) Grewal, the former, present and future secretaries of the Delhi state CPI (M), respectively. Janam actors, including me, walked behind the tempo, carrying the Janam banner. Behind us was a sea of humanity.  

There were at least fifteen thousand people in the procession that day. I had no idea who most of them were. Many came after reading the news, which was prominent on the front pages of all Hindi and English national dailies. Already on that day, through my state of shock and grief, I had begun to comprehend that Safdar’s killing had touched a raw nerve in the country. It had become a cause larger than Janam, larger than Safdar, larger than the Left. It seemed to me to crystallise the feeling of dissatisfaction and anger that was to sweep aside the Congress in the upcoming elections. 

The procession started from VP House on Rafi Marg, went up Sansad Marg to Connaught Place, going around the circle to exit on Barakhamba Road, went past Mandi House to ITO and all the newspaper offices on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, turned right at Ferozeshah Kotla, went past Gandhi Samadhi at Rajghat and up the Ring Road, till it came to the electric crematorium at Nigambodh Ghat. 

As we were walking on Bahadur Shah Road, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked back. It was a stranger. He looked like a bank clerk or someone who worked at one of the newspaper offices.

“Excuse me, can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Were you at the Central Park in Connaught Place about a month ago, one afternoon, singing songs?”

“Yes.”

“So he was the one singing that day?” the stranger asked, pointing to the tempo.

“Yes.”

“I was there too. I didn’t know who you people were. But Hashmi saheb’s personality stayed with me. I told many people about him. I’ve never heard anyone sing Ghalib like he did. He was a good man. Please don’t give up your work. We are with you. I just wanted to pay my respects.”

And the man melted away in the crowd.

After Safdar’s body was consigned to the electric furnace, Mala came to where a bunch of Janam actors were standing.

“There is a proposal that we should perform Halla Bol tomorrow at Jhandapur. What do you people think?”

 

I guess we just nodded.

 

“OK, so then let’s meet tomorrow morning for rehearsal.”

 

I went home that night. As I took off my clothes, I realised that my sweater and jacket had Safdar’s blood stains on them. I had my first bath in three days that night. Then I got into bed and cried.

 

4 January 1989: The Performance 

 

Less than forty-eight hours after Safdar’s death, we performed the interrupted play at Jhandapur, at the same spot. It remains, to my mind, perhaps the single most important performance of a street play in Indian history.

 

We gathered at 6 Talkatora Road, where CITU had its central office; we used to rehearse our street play on its lawns. The same cast that had been in the interrupted performance was to perform again. With one change. Vinod had a job interview that day. Since I knew his lines and moves, I was to be his replacement. I had been in Jhandapur on 1 January, quite by chance. Now I was to perform, again by chance.

 

We did a quick line rehearsal. It was all business-like. I was told I was to speak before the performance. We got into a hired bus. When we reached Mandi House, I realised there were many more buses carrying people to Jhandapur.

 

I counted 15; maybe there were more. Each bus was jam packed, without even any standing space. Hundreds of workers had gathered in Jhandapur. More than five thousand people crammed the narrow streets.

 

Many of them were artists, writers, activists, professionals. There were so many familiar faces, but much of it was a blur for me.

 

The one person who was not there, though, was Sohail. I learnt, decades later, that the reason was that he had been asked to stay back in the Party office, to take the many calls they expected to receive from journalists. Someone senior and responsible was needed to take those—there were no mobile phones back then, after all. It was a horrible miscalculation. All the journalists were at the site of the performance, and Sohail had to answer a total of zero calls.

 

We first went around the basti in a silent procession. We went past Ram Bahadur’s house, paying our respects to him. He had been married a year or so before, and had just had a child about a couple of months earlier. I later learnt that Mala spent some time with his young wife Pavitra and their infant, consoling and giving strength. Parcham, the song squad led by Safdar’s old friend Kajal Ghosh, sang two songs.

 

Tu zinda hai, tu zindagi ki jeet mein yaqeen kar

Agar kahin hai swarg to utar la zamin par

[You are alive, so trust in the triumph of life

If there’s a heaven somewhere, then bring it to earth]

 

and

 

Laal jhanda lekar, comrade, aage badhte jayenge

Tum nahin rahe, iska gham hai par, phir bhi ladte jayenge

[Onwards we march, comrade, holding the red flag

We mourn your loss, but pledge to fight on]

 

I had no idea then that “Laal Jhanda” had been translated from Bangla to Hindi by Safdar.

 

When they sang “Hazaar bhes bhar ke aayi maut tere dwar par / Magar tujhe na chhal saki, chali gayi voh haar kar”—Death came to your door in a hundred guises / It could not deceive you, and retreated, defeated—I choked.

 

There were people everywhere, in every nook and cranny, on rooftops, and even on the garbage dump. I had never seen such an audience before. Many carried hastily made placards that said “Safdar lives” and “Safdar died, but not in vain.” There were red flags everywhere.

 

My mind was blank when I rose to speak. And then, I do not how or from where, the words came. “We are here to perform our interrupted play. We are here to fulfil our commitment to our audience. We are here to say that they can kill us, but they can’t stop us. We are here to honour Comrade Ram Bahadur. We are here because Comrade Safdar Hashmi is not dead. He lives here, among us, and he lives among countless young women and men all over the country.”

 

The play began sombrely. The actors seemed to merely go through the motions. The first few minutes of the play are humorous, requiring us to laugh as well. But everybody was grim. There was a moment when, in response to the cop character trying to stop the play, the actors go into a huddle to decide what to do next. As we went into the huddle, I was right opposite Mala. She looked at everyone sharply.

 

“What’s wrong with you all? Come on, laugh!”

 

As we broke the huddle, she twirled back, laughing.

 

It was as if we had been given a glucose shot. The play came to life, and in seconds, the audience was in splits too.

 

That performance, and photos of Mala performing, were on the front pages of newspapers all over the country the next day. In that simple act, of leading us in a performance at the spot where her comrade and friend, the love of her life, had been felled, she, more than anyone else, captured that incandescent moment. 

 

In the coming days, there were protest demonstrations all over the country, in small towns and large. Mala travelled to Bombay, Tripura and Kerala, and addressed large gatherings. In late January, she went to Calcutta, where we joined her a couple of days later to perform Halla Bol. At the first performance at Calcutta University, where Safdar was conferred a posthumous honorary doctorate, we were mobbed by students. It is the only time I have signed autograph books.

 

That tour culminated with a performance at the basketball court of Salt Lake Stadium, where some twenty-five thousand people came to express solidarity. Poems, songs, and plays were written about Safdar and Mala, artists made paintings and posters, intellectuals and activists gave speeches. Within a few days of the performance on 4 January, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Committee came into being. It was the first step towards the formation of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust—Sahmat—which has played a stellar role in mobilising artists and intellectuals against communalism and the rise of the Hindu Right.

 

From Satyajit Ray to Ravi Shankar, from Adoor Gopalakrishnan to Utpal Dutt, from Krishna Sobti to Rajendra Yadav, the list of artists, big and small, known and unknown, who came out in public displays of solidarity and support, was virtually endless. In a stirring gesture, on 8 January, Shabana Azmi used the stage of the International Film Festival of India being held in Delhi to read out a protest note on Safdar’s killing. Outside, on the overcast, breezy winter day, Dilip Kumar stood in protest with Safdar’s photograph.

 

The following day saw coordinated protests all over the country.

 

Later, on 12 April, Safdar’s birthday, which was celebrated spontaneously as National Street Theatre Day, over thirty-thousand street play performances took place. Rajendra Prasad (“Rajen”), who’s been the chief organiser in Sahmat since its formation, told me years later that in his opinion Sahmat wouldn’t even have come into being but for Mala’s action that day.

 

It is true. Mala was the picture of quiet defiance that day. I remember her eyes—determined, without a trace of the grief that ravaged her soul. Her slender body seemed to have a spine made of steel. She stood erect, ramrod straight. Her slight frame seemed incredibly tall.

 

And that voice. Clear, resonant, ringing, sailing over the audience and into their hearts.

 

This is an edited extract from Halla Bol: The death and life of Safdar Hashmi, by Sudhanva Deshande, published by LeftWord Books.