New Delhi: For four days, Mahmood Farooqui sat in an almost empty room inside Tihar Jail. There was no cast, no script reading, and little indication that his idea of starting a drama class behind bars would work out as a liberating catharsis.Then three or four prisoners came. More followed. Months later, inmates who had never acted before were playing judges, soldiers and figures of authority on stage.Farooqui, the co-director of the film Peepli (Live) who is known for his revival of the Dastangoi storytelling form, was serving a seven-year sentence following his conviction in a sexual assault case in 2016. He had denied the allegations. In 2017, Delhi High Court overturned his conviction. The Supreme Court subsequently declined to interfere with the acquittal.In his memoir, The Tihar Players — which was published this July — Farooqui recounted how that tentative experiment flowered into several productions. For the prisoners, the performances offered a path to “catharsis, hope and redemption”, he said.“It was one of the most emotionally authentic performances I’ve seen. Rarely are even professional actors so unselfconscious,” actor Naseeruddin Shah said after seeing the performances at the launch of the memoir.For Farooqui, the idea began taking shape during his first stint in Tihar in 2015, when he spent four months as an undertrial. At the time, however, he was in no state to pursue this idea, he later said. “I was in a shell. I was totally shocked and I just couldn’t make sense of anything,” he recalled.It was when he returned to the prison following his conviction in 2016 that he decided to act on the idea. Convicted prisoners are required to do “mashakkat”, or some form of labour. This could range from working in offices and wards to hospitals and libraries. Given his educational background, Farooqui was expected to work in the education ward or the library. He proposed holding a drama class instead.The superintendent and ward incharge agreed. Finding willing actors proved to be tougher.Music and singing already had a presence inside the jail, but theatre was unfamiliar territory for many inmates. “Drama is not something that people have been trained to do or people think of doing,” Farooqui said, particularly among those from poorer backgrounds with little exposure to theatre.Eventually, a handful of inmates joined him. Workshops and exercises followed, and within 10 days, Farooqui was devising a play inspired by a story by Premchand. Many inmates could not comfortably read a script, so Farooqui gave them lines and encouraged them to improvise scenes around them.Their own lives became the easiest starting point. Farooqui asked the inmates to recreate scenes from their wards, like encounters with prison staff, moments with their families and the hierarchies of everyday prison life. “The autobiographical exercises made acting more accessible, and also gave the inmates a way to express experiences that were otherwise difficult to articulate,” he said.In about two months, the group had worked on three productions — Nasha, Ramleela and Court Martial. The transformation on stage was striking. Men accustomed to being told where to sit and how to walk were now lawyers, judges and soldiers on stage.Bhanu Raghav, who spent about five-and-a-half years in Tihar in connection with a murder case, said that joining the theatre class meant stepping into a world he had never known. “Slowly, we learnt how scripts and dialogues had to be done, how the delivery should be, how to move on stage, how to take steps and what the body language should be,” Raghav said.When the group staged Ramleela, it had to improvise around prison restrictions. Fire could not be used, nor could anything sharp that would resemble arrows. Farooqui said the inmates’ familiarity with the epic meant that sometimes they knew details that he did not.Theatre could not change anyone’s sentence or resolve a pending case. But Farooqui believes that, even if temporarily, it changed how the inmates experienced prison. “Art allows you a diversion, it allows you to reflect, it allows some catharsis and it offers hope, redemption,” he said.By the time Farooqui left Tihar after about 18 months, the drama class was no more an empty room. His departure was emotional. “We were all crying. They were crying and I was crying,” he recalled. “It felt like we had spent such intense, such loving times together.”Farooqui went back to the prison too, this time as an instructor for two years. Then the Covid pandemic arrived and that ended too. One of the inmates, Bhanu Raghav, continued the drama workshops for some time. Gradually, members of the original group left the prison.Farooqui may be the only inmate who wants to return to Tihar. “Maybe, one day, we’ll go back and start something else again,” he said, before adding with a laugh: “Not as an inmate, though.”
