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In a farmhouse near Gurgaon, a circle of boys talk heatedly about an independent nation. As excitement peaks, slogans no longer suffice and a song bursts through — Saathi haath badhana. The song from Naya Daur , with lyrics by Sahir Ludhianvi, tears through the evening calm. Watching from the side, the 71-year-old Pramila Le Hunte begins to clap. A one-time British politician — in 1983, she became the country’s first Asian woman to contest for Parliament on a Tory ticket — Le Hunte is now realising her dream of directing a play on her favourite lyricist, Ludhianvi.
Called Sahir: His Life and Loves, the musical recreates critical moments of Ludhianvi’s life through 30 songs. “From the time I first went to Cambridge as a young student, I laughed and cried with Sahir. When I was homesick, I’d listen to Jaane woh kaise log from Pyaasa. I promised myself that one day I’d do a play on him,” she says. She was active in the London cultural scene: the Richmond Arts Council roped her in to stage The Tempest, she made a film on Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and worked with the government to create the national curriculum.
It was in Ludhianvi’s words that she found hope and solace when she plunged into politics in the heady 1980s Britain when her hero Margaret Thatcher was fighting the miners’ strike in what came to be known as the “winter of discontent”. He was there as she prepared for marches and rallies, and when she was chosen to contest from Birmingham Ladywood. “If Mrs Thatcher helped me mature as a politician, Sahir kept the fire alive,” she recalls.
Sahir... is her grand fantasy piece. “Anybody can find out the bare details about Sahir by reading a biography. The play is a dramatised version of his life. Fictional accounts of his four important relationships, especially with writer Amrita Pritam, show the audience what could have been,” says Le Hunte. She’s dismissed linear storytelling and used a Brechtian format since “both Bertolt Brecht and Sahir had several similarities in their lives”. “We’ve used montages, fragmentation and interruptions because Brecht felt that realistic theatre dulled the audience into a passive, not alert, state,” she says.
When she threw the casting net a few months ago, Le Hunte had extraordinary luck. “Actor Harish Chhabra walked in through the door and I thought it was Sahir himself. They look so similar. I was taken aback,” she says. Theatre professionals Anju Chhabra and Aarti Wahi have been cast as Amrita Pritam and Ludhianvi’s mother respectively. The lead actors, also good singers, voice many of the songs. But the strongest moment of the play comes at the end — in Le Hunte’s depiction of the songwriter’s death. This is where fantasy emerges from facts and hope overwhelms tragedy.
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