Making space for conversation

At 7 in the evening, there is a sheet spread on the side of the Manaveeyam Lane, a street in the capital city where every Sunday, you will find a cultural gathering. This Saturday, the space got filled with 14 people who got down a train, after a long journey and came to share the experiences they collected on the way. Anish Victor, the man behind this unique project called Unreserved, will not admit it is his idea. “They don’t know what they are saying,” he jokes as his teammates point at Anish, who says you shouldn’t call this a performance, but performance-sharing.The team is travelling through four states – Kashmir, Assam, Karnataka and Kerala – in trains, collecting stories from people they meet in their compartments, and retelling those stories. But not as stories, they would stress, what they share are the effects those stories had on them.

“It is about identities,” Aruna Manjunath says, after coming out of the circle gathered at Manaveeyam. She is the production manager. Joining her is Nihal Passanha, a writer in the group. The idea, they say, goes back to 2012, at the time of the exodus of people from the North East living in Bengaluru. “What could we do?” Anish had asked back then. It took time but the idea took shape as they found local collaborators, as they found artistes working in different media – visual artists and writers among them.

Eight of them are performer facilitators, two from each of the four states they are travelling to. They would listen to the stories of people in trains, in exchange of their own.

“I am someone who went through identity problems myself,” says Sunathi S., one of the performer facilitators from Kerala. “At the time of the 2015-16 ITFOK (International Theatre Festival Of Kerala), I thought I will go one day wearing a purdah. I was surprised to see how it disturbed the people there, whom I thought were liberals. I felt very comfortable in the purdah. But I heard comments like ‘Why do such people come here?’. I couldn’t understand that intolerance,” she says. She had met Anish for an acting and lighting workshop before, and was happy to join Unreserved, even when she could not speak the languages others in the team spoke. “We went to Assam and Kashmir. I didn’t know their languages but I could talk to them easily, and they could talk to me.”

It is at Srinagar, Kashmir, that they realised the methods they used could be more flexible, says Goutham S., the other performer facilitator from Kerala. “We did our performance sharing in Srinagar, and it must have been a little serious. For they said that they are going through serious issues everyday of their lives – a dad getting killed or a 14-year-old niece getting shot or a knee broken when they protest against these. And they didn’t want more seriousness when they came to hear us, they wanted to laugh and sing and dance. So we changed our ways, to include more laughs, more fun,” he says.

“It is basically creating spaces for conversations. At a time when such spaces are getting smaller, we are trying to create them,” says Nihal. “It is not to take these stories they hear in trains and say this is what India is to these people. It is to say what these conversations mean to them. Convert it to those pieces.”
Nihal will be bringing out a book on this project.

They chose trains because that’s the mode of transport that was largely used by the thousands who had fled Bengaluru at the time of the exodus. And they chose those states where similar questions of identities are pending. “Kerala because of the Perumbavoor rape and the migrant hub that Perumbavoor has become,” says Aruna. They want to go to other places too.

For now they will resume the journey that began on October 3, going through Dhemaji-Srinagar-Irinjalakuda, and will end on November 16. They are also trying to raise wages for the artistes who are working for the project for 15 months, travelling 10,000 km, 35 stops, and four destinations.