LAHORE: The Maas Foundation staged a theatre play, titled Rishtiyan Da Ki Rukhiye Naa, at Alhamra Art Center, The Mall on Friday.

The play has been adapted from Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous short story Toba Tek Singh by Indian playwright Dr Atamjit Singh. The play was a production of the Maas Foundation while it was directed by the foundation’s President Aamir Nawaz. He says the play was written in 1981 and it was first directed by the author himself. It has been staged hundreds of times in India, Canada and America by more than 50 different groups of Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu languages. The play has also been published in all these languages besides English. As a part of the curriculum in various courses in different universities of India, the play has been treated as a classic in the Punjabi literature.

Chandigarh-based Dr Atamjit Singh is the author of 34 published plays.. The two prestigious national awards in India in a row—The Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009 and Sangeet Natak Akademy Award in 2010—were a befitting tribute to the distinguished playwright. The National School of Drama also honoured him by declaring a living legend during the Theatre Olympics Festival in 2018. Singh’s cultural and linguistic idiom may be derived from Punjab but the appeal of his plays goes far beyond the limits of a particular region as his plays raise issues of wider human significance. Apart from the direction of his plays he is also known for his solo dramatic recitals that he has done, apart from a number of major Indian cities, in Canada, Kenya, UK and America.

Although the basic element of the plot of Rishtiyan Da Ki Rakhiye Naa is bifurcation of the forgotten inmates of a mental asylum after the Partition of India, yet the playwright, like Manto, has been able to achieve a certain inwardness with which he often tends to approach both the individual/collective psyche of the Punjabi community.

Whether it is Rishtiyan Da Ki Rakhiye Naa or other plays of Atamjit Singh, it’s always a complex web of personal/social/artistic relationships that constitute the content and structure of drama. In this play, he explores fragmented relationships in the society in the post-Partition scenario. Some characters have got detailed characterisation as Atamjit has not only presented the pain, agony, turmoil and sufferings of the ordinary Punjabis, but he has also pitied the overall milieu that could not bear the brunt of the Partition in any dignified manner.

At the individual level, people remained concerned and helpful to each other but at the level of community, the Punjabis, who speak the same language, did the most shameful acts that are unparalleled in more ways than one in the history of mankind.

The cast of the play includes Sarfraz Ansari, Zohaib Haider, Syed Zeeshan Haider, Hassan Raza, Tanveer Khalid, Usman Ali Chaudhry, Hifza Tahir, Ch Zaheer Taj, Imran Armani , Syed Hammad Ejaz, Kashif Nazir, Muhammad Usman Rehan Ahmad Ch.

The play will be staged today as well. It will start at 7:30pm.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2022