‘I’m a product of Indian socialism’: Theatre actor-director MK Raina talks about his life and memoir

An arresting original debut, MK Raina’s memoir Before I Forget, tells the story of a life lived on the frontline of history. With an essayistic attention to detail, it challenges the fallibility of memory and its imperfections to create a space for the convergence of past and present. Among the diversity of encounters, is Raina's life in theatre at the core, movingly and, rivetingly evoked.

The book holds up a mirror to the complexities of Kashmir's contested political history: the tragic and frequent ruptures in its body politic, the dense militarisation, and the ferocity of violence and its many iterations.

“The bond between Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims stretches from birth to death – and even the crazy insurgency in the valley could not destroy that absolute and sacred bond,” he said in a conversation about his memoir, performing Shakespeare in Kashmir, using theatre as a form of protest and more. Excerpts:

How did this memoir take shape?
Losing my home in Kashmir felt like a deep, festering wound that desperately needed healing. I kept returning to the conflict zone, following an unstoppable, pedagogic urge to enliven cultural spaces buried beneath the heavy boots of militancy. The situation was challenging: cross-firings, cordon and search operations, and stone-pelting. Many times, members of my team would withdraw into their shells, unable to handle the relentless stress of the situation for weeks on end, 24 hours a day.

A visitor from the theatre school of Stanford University, who observed my work with traditional folk artists in the Valley, urged me to document my experiences. I let her suggestion, along with several others, pass. It was only during the dark days of the pandemic, when we were all quarantined in our desolate, private spaces, that the idea of breaking the solitude of my memories and lived experiences began to take hold. I sat down with a pen and paper and began to write.

You had to deal with the trauma of your mother’s death during one of the bloodiest periods in Kashmir’s history in January 1990. This part of your story is called Kashmir Implodes and is a compendium of unbelievable stories and unspeakable horrors.
Yes, at the time when my mother was hospitalised with a brain haemorrhage, there were killings, gunshots, and bomb blasts all over the Valley. Somehow, I negotiated the stringent curfew and managed to attend to her needs. My mother was comatose, but there were practically no doctors in that hospital and no nurses to attend to her needs or check her vital signs. While I sat on a bare steel stool next to my mother’s bed at night, I would hear the loud screams of wounded Mujahideens being brought in for surgeries. By morning, there would be no trace of them. When I stepped out, I would see hundreds of vehicles ferrying the Kashmiri Pandits out of the Valley.

When my mother died, her body was brought home with great difficulty in the cover of darkness. And when I went to the police station to get permission to cremate her, I had to deal with foul-mouthed soldiers with machine guns aimed directly at me. Arranging my mother’s funeral was next to impossible. We had to navigate a complete shutdown and shoot-at-sight orders. The truck carrying her body was asked to stop at a checkpoint every 200 feet. The soldiers would remove the shroud from her face to ensure we were carrying a dead body. When we reached the cremation ground, a pious-looking bearded Muslim man performed the last rituals as per a centuries-old tradition. The bond between Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims stretches from birth to death – and even the crazy insurgency in the valley could not destroy that absolute and sacred bond.

Your descriptions, vivid and nuanced, are almost like dispatches from a war zone. You did not have the luxury of taking photographs as an aide-memoire or using a voice recorder. How did you navigate the epistemic gaps in your memory?
While it’s true that I did not keep a digital archive or written records, my years in theatre and cinema have provided me with a formidable visual memory. Moreover, what I experienced was extraordinary and accordingly, it left a permanent imprint on my mind and heart.

You have written about the atmosphere of fear and persecution that forced the Kashmiri Pandits out of the valley in an almost overnight exodus. Rahul Pandita in his book Our Moon Has Blood Clots equated what happened at that point to the holocaust.
Yes, India’s mainstream parties paid only lip service to the genocide and the resultant migration of the Pandits who were forced to live like refugees in their own country. At a personal level, no one bothered to ask about my family and friends in Kashmir. And I must confess, that for fear of being labelled communal, I, too, suffered in silence. The only person who was genuinely concerned was my guru, Ebrahim Alkazi.

You have foregrounded the everyday experience of growing up in Kashmir in the 1950s. The ordinariness of your life was more fragile than you imagined, but clearly, it was not shaped by conflict.
My childhood was delightful. The mohalla where I was born was called Sheetal Nath Sathu. It was a regular middle-class neighbourhood with a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims. Our large Raina clan lived in separate houses with a common lawn. The children had their own cricket and hockey teams. My school was modest but we had amazing teachers. I was encouraged to pursue my creative passions and my participation in a celebrated musical opera, written by Dinanath Nadim and performed at the Jashn-e-Kashmir festival, opened new doors. I was invited to be part of a young writer's forum where I met and interacted with leading poets, writers, playwrights, critics, actors, and visual artists. I also received personal invitations to the performances of artists and musicians like Birju Maharaj and Begum Akhtar. But what I remember most about my childhood days was the camaraderie shared between different communities.

In those days, we felt we could claim the entire valley, venture anywhere! On our “ adventure days” we would climb hills and trek through forests, eating wild berries and grapes. We would spot an odd apple or apricot tree and, like a group of wild monkeys, climb the trees to pick the fruits. When my children, Anant and Aditi, were growing up in Delhi, I loved taking them to a nearby park dotted with silver oak and mulberry trees. In April and May, when the mulberry trees were heavy with fruit, I encouraged them to climb the trees – reminiscing about my own childhood adventures in the valley.

You came to study at the National School of Drama in Delhi in 1967. Your years at the drama school were momentous, were they not?
I am a product of Indian socialism. The Naya Kashmir project ensured that our education from primary school to university was entirely free. A state scholarship made it possible for me to join the School of Drama. When I joined the school, Alkazi was Director. In addition to learning the poetics of theatre, we were encouraged to develop an understanding of all the arts. Icons like Shivaram Karanth, KV Subbanna, KN Panniker, Giriraj Kishore, Master Fida Hussein, Bala Saraswati – the inimitable gurus of our performing arts – laid in us the foundation for understanding and decoding plural traditions. Alkazi also exposed us to the pantheon of the best global theatre directors and writers: Carl Weber, Fritz Bennewitz, Richard Sechner, Jerome Lawrence, Allen Stewart, Joan Littlewood, Shozo Sato, John Arden, and many others.

Our school, housed on the third floor of Rabindra Bhavan in Delhi, also encouraged us to develop a social conscience. Our performance space, the Meghdoot Theatre, was the result of our collective shramdan. Most remarkably, our director also pitched in. We eventually managed to create an open-air theatre with a huge babul tree at the centre, giving the theatre its distinct character. This was the memorable stage where Om Shivpuri, Uttara Baokar, Surekha Sikri, Manohar Singh, Pankaj Kapur, Seema Biswas, KK Raina, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Anupam Kher, I, and others trained and performed.

You were also not immune to the happenings of 1968 – the year that set your imagination on fire. The magnetic allure of the anti-Vietnam war rally in Trafalgar Square, Chicago, Mexico City and Paris did not elude you. It was a period when communism in Central or Eastern Europe was as much of a blight as capitalism – vividly illustrated by the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. One sees echoes of Tariq Ali’s memoir Street Fighting Years in the description of your coming of age politically.
We were certainly greatly impacted by the global surge and ideological churning. We were also greatly influenced by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and the trailblazing books of Frantz Fanon, Bertold Brecht, Meyerhold, Paulo Freire, Pablo Neruda, Jone Bied, Heiner Muller, and G Jackson. The post-colonial discourse in the works of scholars, writers, poets, and artists like Faiz, Makdoom, Nazarul, Muktibodh, Sahir, Raghuvir Sahai, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Hussain, KG Subramanyan, Swaminathan, and several others also influenced us greatly. We were coming of age politically.

When the genocide in East Pakistan took place, we put up innumerable street performances. When the US threatened to bring its Fifth Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, we staged short improvisational street plays, framed around the poetry of Faiz, at the US library building at Bahawalpur House. We followed this with a unique act of protest performance: we bandaged a man from head to toe and stood with him at the entrance of the US embassy.

To keep my activism alive, I began conducting short-term workshops and working with theatre groups in different regions of the country, along with groups in Lahore, Dhaka, and Kathmandu. I was joined by Bansi Kaul, Ravi Baswani, Bhanu Bharati, Prassana, and Ranjeet Kapur. We worked in remote mufassil towns, cities, and villages creating a new, contemporary theatre movement. Later, my friends and I formed an experimental theatre group named Prayog

The toast of India’s avant-garde theatre and arthouse films, you also played the lead in Awatar Krishna Kaul’s 1974 film 27 Down. This was the period when Benegal made Ankur and MS Sathyu directed Garam Hawa.
Yes, I was a strong supporter of this new avant-garde cinema movement. Far removed from money and glamour, the films were made on shoestring budgets but were strong in content and were largely drawn from contemporary literature in different Indian languages. For me, it felt like an extension of my experimental theatre journey. I worked with some of the frontrunners of this unique movement like Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Mrinal Sen, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, TS Ranga, Govind Nihalani, Romesh Sharma, Ketan Mehta, Basu Chatterjee, and Basu Bhattacharya.

Stories nestle within stories in your memoir. You have documented the darkness that descended on the city following Indira Gandhi's assassination, the brutal killings, and the barbaric acts.
The holocaust was unleashed on the Sikhs by the citizens of Delhi using combustible materials such as petrol and diesel. I had read Nadir Shah’s stories and heard of Taimur’s invasions of Delhi, but these were not medieval times! The noise of the riots continued all night on the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and I could not sleep. The next day, I received a call from Jaya Jaitly asking me to gather my theatre group members for a peace march. At about two in the afternoon, around 150 people assembled at the crossing of Moolchand Hospital: socialist leaders like George Fernandes, Madhu Dandavate, Chandra Shekhar, Swamy Agnivesh, Dinesh Mohan, Jaya Jaitly, Ravi Nair, Chiman Bhai Patel, Sumanta Banerjee, and several other eminent people. By the time we reached Lajpat Bhawan, we felt that a peace march could only be the starting point of a more proactive engagement.

We formed the Nagrik Ekta Manch to extend humanitarian aid to the Sikhs housed in camps and temporary shelters. Lajpat Bhawan was our nodal point. We were working round the clock. It was my job to ensure that supplies reached the camps with clockwork precision. My wife Anjali, a paediatrician, was part of the medical team. I remember how my friend Madan Gopal Singh, a renowned Sufi singer, linguist, and film scholar was stuck in his barsati in the Delhi University area. He was rescued by Manjeet Bawa, who went to his place in his jeep and brought him to our base camp. But Madan’s face and the look in his eyes had changed forever. It was no longer the face I knew before October 31, 1984.

The murder of Safdar Hashmi during local municipal elections in Sahibabad on January 1, 1989, and all that followed has been described very vividly in your book. He was one of your closest associates. The eyewitness account given by Sudhanva Deshpande who was acting in the play when the attack happened has been also documented very movingly.
Safdar’s chilling murder devastated all of us. But I want to tell you another story. Within a few days of his death, it was decided that the play Halla Bol would be staged to finish at the very spot where Safdar was attacked in an act to reclaim the space. It must have been a tough call for Mala, his wife, a lead actor in the play. Thousands of people converged at the spot. The performance was a high point in theatre history and a historic moment for Indian protest theatre.

Rabindra Bhawan became the ground zero of protest meetings and a meticulously-organised memorial meeting, during which a demand was made to rename College Road around Mandi House as “Safdar Hashmi Marg”. The Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, SAHMAT, was formed about a month later as a major cultural resistance front that remains firm in its mission of standing up for creative freedoms and the democratic rights of the cultural community. Bhisham Sahni, Vivan Sundaram, Moloyshri Hashmi, Suhail Hashmi, Ebrahim Alkazi, Utpal Dutt, Govind Deshpande, and I were the original trust members. I miss Vivan at SAHMAT these days!

Our next major milestone was the celebration of April 12, which was Safdar’s birthday, as National Street Theatre Day. The response was beyond our wildest dreams. 3000 plays were staged in different vernacular languages all over the country, establishing a great network of theatre activists. Cultural resistance took many forms – many of them spectacular! For instance, “Our Artists Against Communalism” sit-in to uphold the value of secularism and cultural pluralism, conceptualised by Madan, Sohail, Vivan, Shabnam, Ram Rehman, Ashok Kumari, Parthiv Shah, Rajan, and me. It was held on Safdar’s second death anniversary at the Safdar Hashmi Marg. Although initially planned for 12 hours, the sit-in ultimately lasted 17 hours with an impressive line-up of performing artists, writers, poets, scholars, and visual artists. We were supported by two close friends – Kalidas Swaminathan and the late Sabina Sehgal Saikia – who did a considerable amount of leg work.

The demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, on December 6, 1992, resulted in another round of cultural sit-ins titled “Anhad Garje” in cities and metropolises bruised with communal clashes. The Delhi event featured performers not only from different parts of the country, but also musicians from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. And then following considerable deliberation, Anhad Garje moved to Ayodhya. Hum Sab Ayodhya, an exhibition on the history of the ancient city, that also foregrounded multiple versions of Ram Katha, opened on August 12, Quit India Day. The all-night concert titled “Mukta Naad” began at the stroke of midnight on Independence Day, with 3000 artists from different parts of the country standing at the ghats of the Saryu, holding lit candles which they floated in the waters of the river. The event was soundtracked by Nehru’s evocative “Tryst with Destiny” speech. Predictably, cases were filed against SAHMAT. It became a national issue debated in parliament for nearly a week!

Kashmir continued to haunt you. You visited it very briefly after a gap of two years in 1992 – as one of the directors of Siddharth Kak’s Surabhi team and then after a significant interlude following an invitation by the North Zone Cultural Centre you conducted a theatre workshop in Ladakh with fifty girls and boys. Your own television documentaries on Kashmir brought you back to the Valley. The next significant foray came when you returned a few months after militants attacked the Kashmir assembly in Srinagar to conduct an NSD supported theatre residency – working against odds and dealing with the Kafkaesque suspicion of both the militants and the armed forces.
Yes, I managed to find an ideal, isolated space at a university located at the far end of Shalimar Garden, surrounded by mountain ranges on three sides. To pep up my colleagues, I recited a verse by Bertolt Brecht. “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.”

This became our mantra. Theatre clearly needed to be used as a platform for dialogue and as an instrument of healing. We were dealing with bruised minds and souls. We repositioned our teaching plans to include mind and body exercises. The outcome of this strategy was not unexpected. Individual after individual opened up and told us how the last decade of militancy had impacted them.

Their personal histories were not about the politics of the time, but were because of the politics of the time. When we decided to showcase our work, I zeroed in on short stories written by our contemporary writers like Amin Kamil, Hari Krishan Koul, and Aslam Jehangeer. Fortunately, after ten years and being set on fire by militants twice, Tagore Hall was opened for performances. The auditorium was overflowing with people during our play. My actors came up with remarkable lines and tongue-in-cheek, playful remarks. The audience was delighted. I felt my efforts had opened up a little space, like a ventilator, to address the cultural vacuum that had set in.

I decided to hold the next residential workshop, supported by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, in Jammu. This was planned in February 2004 with Muslim children from the Valley, and Pandit children from the migrant camps in Jammu. In addition to the 50 children, I also called interested mothers, most of whom were widows or half-widows. We began with psychotherapy games and added colouring sessions, image-making exercises, games of story-building, and also sessions that included sharing of intimate thoughts and secrets as part of our training protocol.

The two groups were no longer aloof. The stories they shared were heartbreaking. One child had held her father’s legs while he was being dragged out of the house. He was killed even as she was holding on to his legs. Another girl would faint two or three times a day, weeping for her father. What was most moving was the response that came from other children – it was one of solidarity and support. For instance, a girl spoke about an accident in which she was injured and her brother died. She broke down and murmured that she did not have a brother now. Spontaneously, the boy sitting behind her touched her on the shoulder and said, “No, you have a brother here in me; you are not without a brother.” Finally, when the bus to take the children back to Srinagar arrived, no one wanted to leave. There were tears, and some of them broke down completely. It was a scene I could not deal with.

My next workshop, after a gap of six months, was held in the building of a local passport office near the Bakshi Stadium in Srinagar. We decided to produce Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Bhisham Sahni’s Hanush to present the absurdity of the situation in the Valley. The situation was both absurd and grim. An open ground in the stadium was used for the wreath-laying ceremony of ambushed soldiers and CRPF jawans! My mind frequently drifts back to those memories. I cannot help mourning the lost paradise of my childhood.

One of your most intense engagements was with the practitioners of Bhand Pather, a centuries-old folk theatre tradition. Their predicament was dire – they were not allowed to perform and had to hide their costumes, masks, drums, flutes and other accoutrements to protect them from the wrath of militants. You addressed the collective grief of a community that was not being allowed to perform and its economic precarity.
I began my work in Akingam, a village in the Anantnag district, by tapping memories and voices that were struggling to be heard. There were multiple challenges: shutdowns that stretched for weeks, the shadow of militancy, no electricity for days, an erratic supply of daily provisions that forced us to subsist on frugal meals, the task of finding artisans capable of making traditional instruments like swarnais, to cite just a few. Training and preparing another generation of performers was also a challenge. But there was an incredible amount of creative energy and the ability to improvise. I just needed to crystallise it.

Our opening performance was Gosain Pather, an old pather from the traditional Bhand repertoire that reflects the Trika philosophy of Shaivism using the poetry of Lal Ded – the rebel mystic 14th-century poetess of Kashmir. The performance left even hardcore sceptics spellbound. A former cop present at the show gave me a big hug and said, “This play made me forget all the pain and suffering and made me laugh.”

Within five years they were performing King Lear, the bleakest of Shakespeare's tragedies about an ageing volatile autocrat oscillating between sanity and madness. How did this happen?
King Lear was not planned. It happened when I was watching the performance of Darza Pather. I was struck by the characterization of King Darza by seasoned actor Ghulam Mohammed Bhagat. His presence, reflexes, innovative use of space, and improvisations reminded me of Lear. I could see him plumbing the play’s tragic depths and playing Shakespeare’s flawed character to perfection. The process was difficult. The Bhands had never handled a written text or performed a tragedy. We acquired a Kashmiri translation of the play, but when it was read out, they mocked the script, rejecting it outright.

We collectively worked on the adaptation of the text, but the problem was that most of the senior actors could not read. I had to deconstruct the play and allow them to pool all the elements of their unique genre and embed them into the structure of the play. The role of the daughters of Lear became a hotly-contested cultural issue. The Bhands argued that no daughter would treat her father the way Lear’s daughter treated him. After hours of arguments, I agreed to substitute the daughters with sons. Our improvisations resulted in an ambitious production. The excitement was palpable. On the day of the premiere, our actors looked royal in their beautiful brocade turbans as they faced a mammoth audience.

Our next performance was at the Dara Shikoh festival in Srinagar the following day. We packed and left with some amount of trepidation. We were forewarned that Anantnag was very tense due to a firing that had left several young men injured and dead. Our vehicle was attacked with stones by angry, young men. We crouched in our vehicle, protecting our heads with rucksacks, but were soon covered with shards of glass. Dodging further attacks, we arrived in Srinagar for our performance in front of an elite, urban audience at Almond Villa, located at the foot of the Shankaracharya Hill. Here too, our Kashmiri Shakespeare was a big hit. There was not only the overwhelming applause from the rapturous audience but also the people who came backstage to hug the actors.

Our production of Badshah Lear grew wings, even as separatists called for a complete shutdown. Our next venue was outside a village, near a forest close to the Kukarnaag hill, where thousands of people in their colourful dresses converged, walking for miles to watch us perform. Before the performance, we were warned that there would be bloodshed, but hundreds of young men surrounded us protectively and coaxed us to perform. I felt that I could not let them down. As the play progressed, the numbers kept increasing, covering most parts of the acting space, leaving not even space for Lear to die.

Dozens of performances in the North-East followed. We were invited by NSD to participate in the Bharat Rang Mahotsav. We were also invited to festivals in Goa and Pune, and the annual Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Chennai. The IGNCA organised a three-day festival themed “Revisiting Bhand Pather” where, in addition to performances, a seminar was also held.

The story of your incredible life ends rather abruptly in 2012. Are you planning another zeitgeist book, reflecting the spirit of the age?
There are several books lined up. Wait and watch.