summary of the story one world written by safdar hashmi
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Peter Brook begins his book, The Empty Space, with the words: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
But in street theatre, as indeed in life, there is no empty space. The actor knows immediately, feels it in the gut, that this is a contested space. There is a claim being laid to the space by a people who are denied space virtually everywhere else.
Jana Natya Manch (popularly known as Janam) is perhaps India’s best known street theatre group. Founded in 1973 by a group of youngsters that included the late Safdar Hashmi, Janam has performed over 8,000 shows at nearly 100 streets and prosceniums.
I first acted in a Janam play in the summer of 1987, when I was an undergraduate student at Ramjas College in Delhi University. Some DU colleges in the mid and late 1980s, including Miranda House and Deshbandhu College, had become a stronghold of the Students Federation of India, and ideas of the left were very much in the air.