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Saamundi – creating empathy through theater art

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Saamundi – creating empathy through theater art

The theater has the implications to critically rethink the 18th century cultural history, heritage, and folklore tradition of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai that contains the powerful message to represent the pathos, voice and agency of women.

Rafique Wassan  

Thanks to every passing moment after more than one and half year now the Coronavirus 19 pandemic lockdown and mass fear have finally receded, and the social life has resumed its normal course. A moment of hope and security has begun to take root in the form of public art and performance practices for the commons in the public space. Such sight of the renewal of public space came up last week at Mehran Arts Council in Hyderabad on October 31, 2021. With the support and patronage of Sindh Culture Department, the Sindhi theater play Saamundi – the seafarers – based on the poetry and folklore tradition of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, the 18th century Sufi poet of Sindh was staged at the open air theater.

Saamundi-Theater- Sindh-Courier-1This fine-tuned and consciously created theater play written and directed by Shahnawaz Bhatti exhibited the cultural transfer and continuity of the 18th century history and heritage of Sindh in the present. In a way, the theater play imbued with the conceptual art to engage with the folkloric poetry and heritage of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai tended to restore, reinvent, and celebrate the memory, message, tradition and belonging in the present. The theater showed a relevance of tradition in the present by re-introducing the female desire and voice in the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif. In that respect, the theater art practice by Shahnawaz Bhatti that conceptually engaged and brought together the pathos and emotions of the female protagonists in the folkloric poetry of Shah Abdul Latif has the implications to represent the socially progressive and modernist sensibility. For instance, the young married female characters in Saamundi openly speak to secure the emotional and physical relationship. They deplore the vulnerability of care and relationship in the lives of women caused by the prolonged physical absence of husbands.

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Two female characters of theater ‘Saamundi’ staged in Hyderabad

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In this sense, the modern familial notion of care and relationship voiced by women is made visible and relevant in the Sufi folklore tradition of 18th century Sindh. Thus, the theater has the implications to critically rethink the 18th century cultural history, heritage, and folklore poetry of Shah Abdul Latif that contains the powerful message to represent the pathos, voice and agency of women.  Precisely, thinking through the conceptual lens of the ‘performance of past tradition in the present’ (Harrison 2013, Smith 2006) drives us broadly to conceptualize the undoing of the tradition versus modern dualism.

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A view from theater ‘Saamundi’ staged in Hyderabad

In Saamundi, Shahnawaz Bhatti the playwright and director brought to light Shah Abdul Latif’s portrayal of the painful life of Wanjaryoon – the wives of seafarers. The sorrowful Wanjari (wife -in singular) stays back at home in the absence of her seafarer husband gone to faraway lands through sea route for livelihood. The wives of the seafaring merchants gone away for the unknown time periods terribly experience and endure the endless moments of separation and longing both emotionally and physically in the sense of sexual biological need.

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One of the characters of theater ‘Saamundi’

The expression of emotional and physical (read biological instinct) pain and suffering of a wife separated from her seafaring husband was the keystone theme of the theater. To that end, in Saamundi the playwright creatively entailed the powerful representation, voice and inner strength of a woman – Wanjari – who endures pain and suffering at the cost of her physical separation from and emotional longing for the husband. In that way, the performance of Saamundi strongly exhibited and expressed empathy for the Wanjaryoon female characters. In the open air theater hall, the conceptually weaved Saamundi brought people to tears that revealed the affect and power of performance art and addresses the need to create more space and patronage for art and cultural institutions to harness critical, reflective potential of the art for the development of progressive democratic society in Pakistan.

[author title=”Rafique Wassan ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Rafique-Wassan-Sindh-Courier.jpg”]Writer is lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Pakistan[/author]

Photo Courtesy: Shahnawaz Bhatti, writter and director of theater ‘Saamundi’.