Theatre, Resistance And SFI: Safdar’s Delhi University
Sudhanva Deshpande
Safdar Hashmi (12 April 1954–2 January 1989) was a theatre activist who was killed when political goons attacked Jana Natya Manch as the group was performing for CITU in Sahibabad, on the outskirts of Delhi. Also killed that day was a young migrant worker from Nepal, Ram Bahadur. The killing of Safdar led to massive outrage, and literally thousands of people took part in protests across India and beyond. It seemed incredible that two people should be killed for merely a play. At 34, Safdar was a young man with a full and creative life ahead of him. In his death, he became an icon, a symbol of speaking up against injustice – and it was perhaps fitting that the play Jana Natya Manch was performing was called Halla Bol. Below is an excerpt from Sudhanva Deshpande’s book Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi (LeftWord Books, 2020), in which the author paints a vivid picture of the various political movements and currents in Delhi University in the early 1970s, when Safdar was a student there.
[. . .]
Sohail [Hashmi, Safdar’s elder brother] joined Kirori Mal College in 1969. Safdar followed in 1970. Abbuji [Haneef Hashmi, Safdar’s father] and Sohail both wanted him to go to Hindu College, but he ended up joining English Honours at the elite St Stephen’s. Though he read English, he didn’t speak the language well at this time, and he was only accepted in St Stephen’s because someone on the interview committee – he wore a kurta-pyjama for the interview – recognized that the boy was intelligent, and permitted him to speak in Hindi. He did, and impressed the committee with his mind. They figured he’d learn to speak English soon enough, as indeed did happen. But he hated the college, its elite, English-speaking atmosphere, and couldn’t even eat in the canteen because he couldn’t afford anything on the menu there, even though it was subsidized. And oh, St Stephen’s was the only college in Delhi University where you referred to the canteen as a café.
Sohail had become politicized by now and was an activist of the SFI. In my interviews with them, both [singer] Madan Gopal Singh and [theatreperson] M.K. Raina remembered Safdar from this time as a good looking, tall, slim boy, shy, and quiet, but well read. ‘Sohail was very proud of his younger brother,’ Raina said. Even as Safdar was getting politicized, he was attracted to a group of Naxalite students in St Stephen’s. More than anything else, what made him gravitate towards them was that they too had no money to buy anything in the canteen. Sohail was angry and ticked him off. Safdar argued back, and the brothers didn’t speak to each other. The infatuation wore off in maybe ten days, and Safdar was back with the SFI.
Nearly a decade later, Safdar was to write to Prabhat Upreti, who had become his closest friend in Srinagar, Garhwal: ‘I have no desire to pick up a stengun and kill a few bastards. I pity people who think or act like this. I feel like explaining things to them, to open their eyes. . . . They’ve erected barricades of fake bravery and glory on the path of the revolution. If you seek inspiration from them, you’ll be destroyed.’
[. . .]
What was the university like, when Safdar joined St Stephen’s?
In the mid-1960s, Delhi University looked markedly different from what it does now. Where now the Students’ Union office building stands, close to the Arts and Law faculties, there stood a row of barracks. Wenger’s, the bakery and confectionaries shop which still runs in Connaught Place, ran a restaurant out of those barracks. You could get a pot of tea, serving four cups, for 84 paise. If you were generous, you added a 16 paise tip, taking the price of tea per cup for a group of four to 25 paise. Citing inflation, Wenger’s decided to increase the price of a pot of tea to nearly double.
The 1950s had been a period of relatively low inflation in India, thanks to the Five-Year Plans. Inflation started to creep up in the early 1960s, and between June 1963 and June 1964, the prices of food articles rose by 13.4 per cent. In August 1964, the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia proposed to the Jan Sangh (the erstwhile avatar of the current BJP), and the left and right factions of the Communist Party to initiate what came to be called the Price Rise Resistance Movement (PRRM). The Jan Sangh was sceptical, as was the right faction of the Communist Party, but the left faction joined enthusiastically. The main site of the struggle was the Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place, outside which protesters set up a makeshift stall to serve cheap coffee. The boycott of ICH proved spectacularly successful, drawing support from writers, journalists, politicians, artists, and ordinary citizens, and after about two months, the ICH was forced to revert to its pre-agitation rates. The agitation had an effect on other items as well, and succeeded in lowering prices for all consumers, not just coffee addicts.
When Wenger’s decided to increase its prices in 1966, a group of students, inspired by the success of PRRM, wrote in protest to C.D. Deshmukh, Vice Chancellor of Delhi University. Deshmukh knew a thing of two about economics – he had been the first Indian appointed as Governor of the Reserve Bank under the British, and went on to become the finance minister of India under Nehru, from 1950 to 1956. He probably didn’t want an agitation on campus, for which he knew there would be popular support in the city. He invited five students to meet him. One of them was Rajendra Prasad (‘Rajen’), who was then pursuing a PhD in philosophy. Deshmukh asked the students what they wanted. They proposed running a cooperative canteen on campus. He agreed, and appointed a teacher as their advisor. Rajen and his comrades started the cooperative canteen, where they served a full meal for one or two rupees. Hundreds of students would come to have that meal, and the cooperative canteen became a centre of student organizing.
The All India Students’ Federation (AISF), the student front of the Communist Party of India (CPI), didn’t have much of a presence on campus then. The opposition (to the Congress, that is) space was dominated by socialist groups, of which the Samajwadi Yuvjan Sabha (SYS) was the most prominent. The CPI split in 1964, resulting in the birth of the CPI (M), but it wasn’t until 1970–71 that the mass fronts of the party split. As Rajen tells it, the three individuals who built the CPI (M) on campus in the late 1960s were all teachers – Kumaresh Chakravarty, Zahoor Siddiqui (both former presidents of the Delhi University Teachers’ Association), and Kitty Menon.
Kumaresh Chakravarty, in particular, played a stellar role in democratizing the university. In August 1967, he led a revolt of teachers during the general body meeting of the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA). Till that point, DUTA was a pocket body of a handful of powerful administrators and principals, who got their cronies elected year after year. Sensing the mood of the teachers, who were galvanized by Chakravarty’s fiery speeches, the authorities agreed to hold an open election. The democratic group won a resounding victory, with Chakravarty getting elected to the executive. In 1971, he was elected president of DUTA, defeating the Jan Sangh-backed candidate. Under his leadership, DUTA made common cause with the karmacharis, championing their demands, as well as with the school teachers’ agitation in neighbouring Haryana. Among other important democratic victories of the teachers’ movement was the ending of the tenure system for department heads; instead, a rotational system ensured that every department head held the post for a limited period. The teachers’ movement also got the central government to withdraw a bill in Parliament that would have replaced teachers’ unions with ‘college councils’. Till these struggles took place, English-speaking professors and principals from elite backgrounds dominated the university. Now, a number of teachers from humbler backgrounds became leaders of DUTA. It has always been a bit of an anomaly that in a city politically dominated by the Congress and Jan Sangh/BJP, and lately the Aam Aadmi Party, the largest university has always had a sizeable Left teachers’ movement.
The SFI came up around 1970, but even before that, Left students organized artistic activity. One such was a production of Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Exception and the Rule. At a time when Camus, Sartre, and existentialism were the rage, Rajen came across a book that contained this Marxist play, which impressed him deeply. He asked Mansur Saeed to translate it. Mansur bhai, as he was called, was Safdar and Sohail’s cousin, who later migrated to Pakistan and set up the theatre group Dastak in Karachi. His daughter Sania is a celebrated actress there. The cast for the play included the future filmmaker Ketan Mehta. They also organized an exhibition on Brecht in the Hindu College foyer. Rajen played an important role in getting Sohail into the SFI. He also got the artist Vivan Sundaram’s pencil sketches on Pablo Neruda’s masterpiece, The Heights of Macchu Picchu, for exhibiting at Kirori Mal College. Then there was a programme on the Cuban Revolution, held in what was then called the Tutorial Building, next to the Sri Ram College of Commerce library.
Sohail remembers that the Communist stalwart Hare Krishna Konar, a hero of the anti-colonial struggle who was imprisoned at the notorious Cellular Jail on Andaman Islands in 1933 for six years and who later became the chief architect of the Left Front’s land reforms in West Bengal, Operation Barga, was invited to speak about the agrarian crisis to Kirori Mal College by the SFI. It is astonishing how some crises never seem to go away. Noam Chomsky says somewhere that when he’s invited to speak and the date is set, say, a year in advance, he safely gives the title, ‘The Current Crisis in the Middle East’, because there is always a current crisis there, thanks to Israel and the Americans, and their assorted clients. So it is with India. You can be sure there will always be an agrarian crisis of massive proportions here (for as long as the ruling classes comprise of the monopoly capitalists and the big landlords, that is). Konar spoke no English, and he could barely speak Hindi. The electricity went off sometime during his speech, so the public address system wouldn’t work, nor the ceiling fans. Three hundred people were crammed in a lecture hall that was supposed to hold a hundred and fifty. Many were Economics students, but there were others as well, and they were all engrossed as Konar dissected the agrarian crisis, the need for land reforms, the Congress’s approach versus the Left’s, and so on, over three hours. ‘Nobody left,’ recalls Sohail.
Then there were talks organized regularly by the Delhi University Discussion Society (with the playful acronym DUDS) at the lecture hall of Delhi School of Economics. These would be delivered by scholars and activists such as Kitty Menon, Bipan Chandra, Harbans Mukhia, Romila Thapar, and others. Rajen mentions another regular, perhaps weekly, study circle. It comprised of radical students, some of whom were of socialist persuasion, some of whom were Communist, and some undecided. The study circle was addressed by, among others, historians Nurul Hasan and Satish Chandra, who came all the way from Aligarh for it. Aroon Purie, founder-publisher of India Today, was a part of this study circle, and some of its sessions were held in his office in Connaught Place.
A number of young women gravitated towards the Left, and some of them became active in the SFI: Madhu Prasad, who returned from England to join Delhi University, already politicized; Babli Gupta, whose house in Old Delhi was a hub of Left cultural activity, and whose brother Vinod Nagpal became a well-known actor; Ranjana Narula, who has dedicated her life to the women’s movement, and later, the trade union movement; Indira Jaisingh, one of India’s outstanding lawyers, who has taken on the might of the current Modi government; Darshana Bhogilal, who, among other things, later took up the cause of Mumbai’s pavement dwellers through her work with the People’s Union for Civil Liberties; Madhu Kishwar, founder of the feminist magazine Manushi, who today is a fan of Modi, but who became president of the Miranda House Students’ Union as a Left candidate back then.
Young activists on the Left would have raging debates on the character of the Indian ruling class. Was it the national bourgeoisie, or an alliance of the monopoly capitalists and the big landlords, or the comprador bourgeoisie that ruled India? Those who argued the national bourgeoisie line wanted to see a National Democratic Revolution in India; those who argued the monopoly capitalists–big landlord line wanted to see a People’s Democratic Revolution; and those who argued the comprador bourgeoisie line felt that a socialist revolution was imminent and that one spark would light the prairie fire. These lines corresponded to the CPI–CPI (M)–CPI (Marxist-Leninist) differences. Even though the RSS’s student front, the ABVP, was strong in Delhi University (the late BJP union minister Arun Jaitley was elected president of the Delhi University Students’ Union on an ABVP ticket in 1974, for example), and the Jan Sangh had a base in Delhi, the Hindu Right was a peripheral force in Indian politics as a whole. For young people in the 1970s, then, the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, with his slogan of ‘Total Revolution’, was one pole of attraction, while the various Communist formations were the other. Even though there was much difference among those on the Left on the question of the characterization of the ruling class, and therefore on the stage of revolution, what was common to all factions and tendencies was opposition to American imperialism, particularly in the context of the war on Vietnam. With this also came the cultural influence of the American counter-culture – Bob Dylan and Joan Baez; Pete Seeger; Andy Warhol and pop art – and the American hippie culture.
By 1970, the SFI was a presence on campus. That summer, during the college break, Rajen and Sohail were among a large number of young men and women from Delhi, Haryana, and western UP, who came together for a training workshop at Rohtak, Haryana, conducted mainly by Ved Gupta and Mahender Singh, along with M.A. Javed. All three taught in Delhi University colleges, lived in Old Delhi, and the first two, in particular, played a stellar role in teaching generations of young people the basics of Marxism. The veteran Communist kisan leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet, a major figure on the national political scene, came to take a class, throwing the police deployed there into a frenzy.
For that generation of student activists, then, if anti-imperialism was a cardinal belief, so was the defence of democracy in India, alongside trying to understand the causes of the terrible poverty suffered by India’s poor. It is assumed today that the Left students’ movement began in the Jawaharlal Nehru University. However, the fact is that the more influential JNU Left students’ movement follows that of Delhi University. It was in this atmosphere that Safdar joined St Stephen’s College in 1970, at the age of 16, thanks to the two double promotions he had got as a schoolboy.
This is an excerpt from Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi, written by Sudhanva Deshpande and published by Leftword Books. The book is on sale here.
Sudhanva Deshpande is a theatre director and actor. He is the editor of Theatre of the Streets: The Jana Natya Manch Experience (Janam 2007), and co-editor of Our Stage: Pleasures and Perils of Theatre Practice in India (Tulika 2008). He joined Jana Natya Manch in 1987, and has acted in over 4,000 performances of over 80 plays. He has held teaching positions at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Since 1998, he has been Managing Editor, LeftWord Books.
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