Don't miss out on dramatised readings of stories by literary greats that pay tribute to the different facets of a woman
The Katha Kathan team at rehearsals
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This Women's Day, Katha Kathan have organised a dramatised reading session titled The Nayika Pentology, featuring five women-centric stories. "We didn't want to stick to run-of-the-mill stories. We wanted to do something different, so we turned our focus to women writers," says Jameel Gulrays, 68, former advertising executive, Urdu lover and founder of Katha Kathan.
Katha Kathan is an initiative to use dramatised readings, narrations and dialogue to revive and sustain interest in Indian language literature.
Manto
The five stories are in Hindi, Urdu, Daccani, Bengali, and Marathi; the Bengali and Marathi stories are being adapted and presented in Hindi. Each story explores a different characteristic of a woman. Three of the five writers are women. "Saadat Hasan Manto is an exception because he wrote about women with great depth and understanding; the other story is a translation that's been done by one of the reading artists," adds Gulrays.
The story by Manto is called Aulad. "It is about a woman who unable to become a mother, loses her mind and starts living in an imaginary world where she has five children. Her husband takes pity on her and finds her a newborn child to care for. But, on finding herself unable to feed the child, the wife chops off her breasts and dies," says Gulrays. The story is believed to have been written after a woman in Manto's neighbourhood cut off her breasts.
The translated story is Rabindranath Tagore's monologue Stree ka Patra, one of his most pathbreaking stories. It is a monologue about a woman who has left her husband's house and is writing him a letter. In it, she describes her childhood, her wedded life and all that she suffered when she was married to him. "One of the artistes, journalist Shritama Bose, has translated this into Hindi and will be reading it out herself," adds Gulrays.
Utaran is an Urdu story by Wajida Tabassum, who wrote about the Nizam period of Hyderabad. Gulrays' wife, Rekha Rao, will be part of this reading. The controversial story is about two friends, one of whom is poor and is thus resigned to a fate where she has to live with the other girl's castaways. She plots revenge and manages to do it by seducing the girl's husband a night before their wedding.
Hindi writer Krishna Sobti's Meri Maa Kahaan is about a Hindu man who wants to raise an abandoned Muslim girl as his sister. Marathi writer Rekha Baijal's Khoya Mujhe, Paaya Mujhe, will be presented in Hindi.
The stories will be enacted by Madhavi Ganpule, Asmita Dabhole, Farhan Siddiqui and Dhanashree Karmarkar, Shritama Bose and Mahithi Pillay, with Gulrays doing the roles of extras.
The Katha Kathan events have limited seats, so it's best to book ahead to avoid dsiappointment.
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