Theatre veteran MK Raina explores importance of cultural education, Kashmir and healing power of stories in memoir

Raina says that he would like Indians to understand that the nation was built on the foundations of pluralism and sacrifice. It is with that purpose that he has penned his memoir, Before I Forget (Penguin). “Our contemporary times have started interpreting our past on very narrow and sectarian lines. I feel the need to record my eye-witness account of events while growing up and how they shaped me,” he says.

In 1948, when Raina was born, India and his state were emerging out of partitions. He begins his story at Sheetal Nath Sathu, a middle-class mohalla in Srinagar, which was populated by Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits. This is where Raina had his earliest experience of syncretic living and watched his first plays at a local school. Raina’s generation would see Kashmir’s slide from harmony to chaos and the book becomes a personal record of the times, especially the exodus of Raina’s community, the Kashmiri Pandits. “There is a saying in Kashmiri Pandit homes that, from birth to death, the participation of Muslims in our lives has been a custom for centuries,” he writes.

MK Raina directing Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit

What Raina does not mention in the book is that he was built to be progressive from childhood. His father, Janki Nath Raina, a dentist popularly known as Jana, had been a part of the Quit Kashmir movement as a child. Jana was in the political movement after the Partition, which was very progressive, and was the person who was called upon to resolve the problems of the neighbourhood. “I still look at his letters which he wrote to me. He was so confident that the reign of pluralism would never disappear from Kashmir. I like to believe he was right and this little muck on the top needs to be cleaned,” says Raina.

Political turbulence kept unfolding in the background as Raina grew up, especially the dismissal and arrest of the Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, and his release after 11 years. The exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits is depicted through his family’s painful departure. Srinagar was shut down due to violence the day his mother passed away. “Through those pitch-dark roads, without headlights and with no street lights, my brother brought the remains of my mother home,” he writes. Within days, his family locked their house and left Srinagar. “My father was not the same person after that. Once, I took him for a drive in Delhi to cheer him up. He looked at me and said, ‘I have lost’,” says Raina.

The politics of Kashmir would prove formative for Raina, for what he refused to become. “While many Kashmiri Pandits turned bitter, even communal, it is amazing that Raina remained totally committed to a secular nation state. He retained his secular ideas through very difficult circumstances,” says photographer and curator Ram Rahman.

Raina was introduced to theatre and classical music as a child in Srinagar. His principal at school was the legendary poet and social activist Dinanath Nadeem, and one of Raina’s first performances was for a children’s musical play, Neki Badi, written by Nadeem. Raina was a sought-after child actor for the dozens of amateur theatre groups in Srinagar. In 1968, he was accepted into the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi, supported by scholarship from the state of Jammu and Kashmir. NSD was helmed by Ebrahim Alkazi, the doyen of modern Indian theatre, who threw students into an ocean of world drama, from Greek and Asian to Sanskrit and modern Indian writings. Alkazi, a fighter in his own right, dreamed of major theatrical breakthroughs and turned NSD into a crucible of experimentation and innovation.

Acts of Resistance

Theatre veteran MK Raina on his recent memoir, why cultural education is important, events in conflict-ridden Kashmir that shaped him and how stories balm a society’s pain

Raina began to make plays to highlight the plight of the suffering people. Karmawali is about the Partition but its real tragedy is that the violence is still happening. Banbhatt ki Atmakatha, one of the great successes of the NSD Repertory Company, was about ancient India but also about a modern vision. Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein showed the 14-15th century poet-saint as a fearless fighter who took on the high priests of temples and mosques. Long before Oppenheimer became a film, Raina had directed and played the nuclear scientist in the play, The Trial of Oppenheimer. He went into conflict zones, from Kashmir to Ladakh to Manipur, to create theatre often with actors and audiences who have been victims of oppression. “Stories are a balm, a healing ointment, which all theatre people carry and it works,” he says. After the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Raina worked in the camps and talks about it in the book.

When he isn’t making plays, Raina is organising events. “One of the major interactions I had was when he organised, with INTACH, a workshop for school children in Srinagar that included theatre, photography, painting, literature and music. He took us, senior practitioners from different parts of India, to live in Srinagar for two weeks and interact with school children, who were brought from all over the Valley. It is more than 15 years but I am in touch with the children. It is amazing that they are continuing with their photography or other art forms even when they are working in motorcycle repair shops and so on,” says Rahman.

Raina in a scene from Badshah Pather, a play he directed

After Safdar Hashmi, the hugely talented and committed theatre activist, was attacked while performing a street play, Halla Bol, about class struggles, in Delhi in 1989 and lost his life, Raina was at the forefront of setting up the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat). For 30 years, Sahmat has been the loudest voice of the country’s artistic community in upholding creative freedom and democratic rights and calling out transgressions of the political classes. Sahmat went to Ayodhya after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and put up a 17-hour show, Mukt Naad, to showcase communal harmony. After the event, Raina walked up to Atal Behari Vajpayee and said, “You have accused us of being anti-national. Here are two cassettes of our anti-communal campaign concerts. Please listen to them and make up your mind about us.”

Today, as India’s tryst with destiny enters another unchartered territory, Raina has a new avatar as a writer. The deathly silence of Delhi roads during the pandemic had reminded him of Srinagar and Imphal and inspired his memoir. The writing bug has caught him. There are more books lined up – a compilation of writings by others on his theatre in English and Hindi, and an academic work on Bhand Pather, a traditional performance form of Kashmir. There are also letters from his father. “I might publish them and call it, The Letters Never Answered,” he says.