TAMASHA

The stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, are free of religious biases and national zeal. He deals with the complexities of loss, grief, poverty and gender politics in an ethos, both powerful and timeless.

Saadat Hasan Manto wrote about the partition of the country in its broader framework but within that he explored human vulnerability and survival skills. Seething with rage at an unfair social system, he used words to dissect, investigate and analyse human beings living on the margins of the social ladder with compassion and empathy... his range of writing travels through time and culture and do not seem dated or irrelevant. Manto’s stories are not polite. He constantly challenged the hypocrisies and deceptions of the society he lived in. His stories seething with rage and disruptions, forced his readers to ask complex questions about gender, disparity and misogyny.

Tamasha, Ten Rupees, Smell , Dog of Tetwal, Rats of Shahdol and The hundred Watt Bulb , fragmented, fractured and unrelated, are the stories used in this play .

These are the lives of the forgotten people, those who exist on the marginalised fringes of society.