On Sunday, Natrang's weekly stage in Jammu belonged to a story about a family thrown into confusion by a stranger at the door. The theatre group staged Sagar Sarhadi's Hindi play Yeh Kaun Aaya, directed by Neeraj Kant, as part of its long-running Sunday Theatre series — and for Natrang, the performance closed a loop more than twenty years in the making.
Introducing the playwright before the show, Natrang director and Padma Shri awardee Balwant Thakur recalled that Sarhadi — the screenwriter behind Bollywood films including Kabhi Kabhie, Silsila, Noorie, Bazaar and Doosra Aadmi — had visited Natrang back in 2005. He told the group then that he wanted to see his own plays staged under its Sunday Theatre banner. It took more than two decades, but Sunday's performance finally fulfilled that wish.
A domestic mix-up, played for laughs and warmth
Yeh Kaun Aaya is a light, character-driven comedy about family, misunderstanding and marriage. It follows Shyamlal and Rajkumari, a middle-class couple waiting on the marriage of Shyamlal's younger brother Paresh, whose quiet routine is upended when a young woman named Neeta shows up unannounced and introduces herself as Paresh's wife. Convinced at first that she might be an intruder, the couple is gradually won over by Neeta's warmth — and by the time Paresh arrives to explain that he'd kept the marriage quiet out of nerves about how his family would take to her, the confusion has turned into an evening of comic, emotionally warm domestic theatre.
The cast featured Palshin Dutta, Vrinda Gujral, Mihir Gujral, Aryan Sharma, Narinder Verma and Khushboo Pandita. Neeraj Kant, who directed the production, also handled its lighting design; Aadesh Dhar composed the music, and Sahir was credited for the presentation.
Natrang, and the man who built it
The group behind Sunday's staging is older than most of its audience. Natrang was founded on 15 May 1983 by Balwant Thakur, then a University of Jammu student in his early twenties, along with a group of fellow students. Its very first productions — Neeli Jheel and Nahen Kandhey Nanhen Pair — went up at Abhinav Theatre in Jammu, and within two years the group was already collecting best-production, best-director and best-actor honours at All-India competitions. Today, Natrang counts itself the first full-time professional theatre group in Jammu and Kashmir, with more than 7,200 performances and appearances at over 350 national and international festivals to its name.
Thakur's own body of work extends beyond Natrang's Sunday stage. Working with the Dogri playwright Moti Lal Kemmu, he trained roughly a thousand performers from twenty different groups in the traditional Kashmiri folk-theatre form of Bhand Pather, resulting in some 40 productions that helped revive a fading art. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award — India's highest recognition for a practising performing artist — in 1999, and the Padma Shri in 2013. The Sunday Theatre series itself, which gave Sunday's audience Yeh Kaun Aaya, has been running for over two decades and was the subject of an earlier JammuBeat feature on how it has kept live theatre a weekly habit in Jammu.
For a city with a thin commercial theatre circuit, that consistency is the point: a free show, every Sunday, for anyone who wants to see live performance rather than read about it. Sunday's play added one more name — a screenwriter who shaped some of Hindi cinema's most enduring films — to a stage that has now been running long enough to make good on a promise made two decades ago.
Source: Daily Excelsior.
