AGRA BAZAR
Director – Writer : Habib Tanvir
Group : Naya Theatre, Bhopal, M.P.
Language : Hindustani
Duration : 130 mins
Date : 13 Feb 2025
Play : Agra Bazar
In Agra, depression prevails over the bazaar and nothing sells,. A cucumber – seller feels that if he could get a poem witten about the qualities of his product, it would sell better. He approaches several poets but they turn down his request. Finally he goes to the poet Nazir who promptly obliges him He returns singing Nazir’s song about cucumbers and customers flock for his product. Other vendors – Ladduwala, The Tarboozwala, etc. follow suit and soon the whole bazaar is humming with Nazir’s songs. Around this main plot is woven the story of a young vagabond who pursues a courtesan and comes to a sticky end at the hands of his rival a police inspector, whom he has earlier shamed in this game of love.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
The Play is woven around Nazir Akbarabadi’s humanistic poetry and humanism is the theme of the play. Nazir a truly proletarian poet, often wrote on demand for vendors and traders, beggars and vagabonds, never caring to collect or publish what he wrote. His colloquialism and slang cut him off from the mainstream of Urdu poetry; his work was ‘discovered generations after his death by a change encounter of a literary man who was attracted by a beggar’s song. Some material was recovered from Nazir’s grand daughter and published in book form, thought much of the total corpus is now lost. Nazir never appears in Agra Bazaar as no authentic account of his life IS available. All we know is that the poet earned a modest living by giving tuitions to young children refusing invitations and commissions from well- wishers like the Nawab of Lucknow. The kite – seller’s shop where people gather and recite the plebeian poetry of Nazir serves as a counterpoint to the book shop opposite where the elitist values of court poetry are discussed in between flows the mainstream of life – with potters prostitutes, vagabonds, and do-nothings. This life, depicted so richly and abundantly in Nazir’s poetry, does not touch the book shop milieu and totally eludes the literature gathered there. Written and staged in 1954, Agra Bazaar was my first serous experiment integrating song with drama and rural actors with urban. Its first production 35 years ago included actors from the Jamia Milla intelligentsia – teachers and students -as well as villagers from nearby Okhla. The play was revived in 1970 with some Chhattisgarhi actors and again in 1976. The musical structure of the play is fundamentally the same as in 1954, with the exception of one or two songs, specially “Banjara Nama”, which was introduced in 1970, and for which music was composed by the Late Hukum Chand Khalili of Bhatinda, who also played the role of Fakir in the play
NAYA THEATRE
Naya Theatre, Founded in 1959, is a professional touring theatre company that has been performing continuously across the length and breadth of India, as wellas in many places abroad. The company began in Delhi, but moved its base to Bhopal in the 90s. The core actors of Naya Theatre come from amongst the highly talented performers and singers of rural Chhattisgarh. However, Naya Theatre does not perform traditional or rural forms of theatre-from very early on, even before the group was established ; Habib Tanvir had begun experiments with language , from and most importantly a mix of urban and rural performers. The coming together of Tanvir and the Chhattisgarh artists eventually resulted in the creation of a unique. Modern Indian theatre idiom, which caught the imagination of the Indian Public with Charandas Chor in 1975 and has never quite released it since,
HABIB TANVIR
Journalist, Playwright, Play Producer, Poet and Director, Habib Tanvir’s name is one of the most well known and respected names in the field of theatre. He was born on 1st September 1923 at Raipur, Madhya Pradesh (Now Chhattisgarh); having received his training in acting from RADA, London and in direction and production at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, United Kingdom (U.K.). He founded ‘Naya Theatre in 1959 and continued to be its director this demise on 8th June 2009. In addition to being an active member of IPTA, Mumbai in his early days, he had also been an editor and drama critic. Some of his main production including Agra Bazaar, Mitti Ki Gadi, Charandas Chor, Jin Lahore Nahi Vekhya, Rajrakt and many more. Shri Tanvir was the recipient of numerous awards and felicitations such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Shikhar Samman for Drama, the Nandikar Award, the Fringe First Award, the Padmashri and the Padma Bhushan, amongst many others.
