Presumed Guilty

Good-bad,right-wrong, once you tag things like that, you lose the ability to see the complete truth.... A murderer can also be a loving father. Don't tag things. Words are insufficient to describe the picture in totality. Try not to get trapped in the dictionary meaning of words."

Vijay Tendulkar's Khaamosh! Adaalat Jaari hai (Silence! The Court is in Session), has seen many an enactment and is almost staple study material for humanities students. A tale told with the utmost simplicity, it brings inequality, hypocrisy and discrimination under its unsparing lens. Saarthak, a city-based theatre group, will present their own version of the Tendulkar classic, with some modifications. "We have simplified the language and given the characters new backstories," explains Shaurya Singh, who directed the play with Deevas Gupta. Also a poet, writer and aspiring actor, Gupta is behind this Hindi adaptation, Shaurya explains. "We have speeded up the plot a little bit, because the original doesn't reach a head until halfway through the story."

Silence! was a natural choice for Saarthak, being a story about a group of actors. The troupe travels to a village to performa a play and decide to spend their hours waiting with a game. They decide on a mock court and choose one of their female actors to play the defendant. What starts out as a bit of fun soon escalates into something else entirely as prejudice, scorn and insecurity rise to the surface.

"Their interrogation begins to draw from her actual life and her personal experiences," says Shaurya. "They're victimising her, after a point, being almost vindictive. The actor in question is a free spirit, she's playful and doesn't conform to the norms of what a woman should be," he says. Written in 1971, the story finds even more relevance today than it did back then.

"As a society, we tend to hide behind talk of how far we have come. In reality, we haven't really changed much, we're still hghly judgmental people who will cast someone aside because they don't fix the boxes that we create." Being actors themselves - this hit home. "Relatives often say, 'What do you do'? When you say you're in theatre, they say, 'But what do you do for work'?," says Shaurya, adding that even norms like curfews for girls continue to exist in so-called progressive homes.

It's a text-heavy play, performed with total adherence to reality. "There's very little movement and all the actors are on stage all the time," says Shaurya. This sets it apart from the bounty of stories "told with doses of humour," which have taken over the local theatre scene. "As artists, our job is not to entertain. It is to mirror society. It will disturb, it will shock, but that's what we do.":

What: Khaamosh! Adaalat Jaari hai
When: April 8, 6.30 pm, April 10, 7.30 pm
Where:  Atta Galatta, Koramangala, Ranga Shankara, JP Nagar, II Phase