Theatre: In ‘Apne Ghar Jaisa’, a quiet critique of everyday bigotry

Even before the play Apne Ghar Jaisa (Think of This as your Home) has begun, the dank undertones of its title already alert the sensitive spectator to the play’s intent.

Theatre director Anmol Vellani’s powerfully quiet and disturbing Hindi adaptation of British playwright Barry Bermange’s 1960s play Oldenberg, written at a time when immigration into Britain was peaking and race relations were growing restive, is a play for our times in India.

The growing majoritarianism is plain to see. This everyday bigotry is the play’s material and context.

But what makes works like Ranga Shankara’s Apne Ghar Jaisa stand out is their refusal to mount an obvious and strident critique. The play prefers to work with a deceptively subdued political charge which, even in the absence of any polemics (or perhaps because of it), leads quite naturally to searching questions about the role of the arts and what kind of artistic responses feel right in a particular set of social circumstances as exist in India today.

Vellani believes that the play quite plainly asks “spectators to confront certain truths about the social world they inhabit”. But although that may be construed as a statement of purpose, he is not one to develop creative strategies to elicit a particular response from the audience. Such...

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