Thirty years after the brutal killing of his dearest friend and comrade, Safdar Hashmi, theatre director and actor Sudhanva Deshpande wrote Halla Bol, a theatre book like few others. It does not deal in nostalgia nor does it delight in trivia. It is the harrowing recounting of the last days of the life of Safdar Hashmi. 

Deshpande is known for his work in theatre but he is also a writer, publisher of LeftWord Books, and an active member of Jan Natya Manch since 1987. 

 

Marginalia:  

What was the most challenging part of writing the book?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

Actually, the most challenging part was to start writing. A lot of people have asked me, how long did it take you to write the book? And there are two answers to this. First, the question is, how long did it take me to write it? Which is the physical act of writing. How long did it take me not to write, is the other part. I first thought of writing a book on Safdar 25 years before I wrote this. This I wrote in the summer of 2019. So it took me 25 years to actually start writing. And when I started writing, then it was just extraordinarily fast. And I say this also, because as a publisher myself, I have some idea of how long it takes people to write. And I'm also a writer. But I have never written a full-scale book. So it took me a total of 45 days from the first day to the last day, to complete the first full draft of the book, which was a little bit longer than it is now.  

 

Marginalia:  

You wrote the book 30 years after Safdar Hashmi's killing. Why?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

I knew that I wanted to write a book. But I also instinctively felt that I didn't want to write a biography, in a conventional sense of how biographies are written. And so given that I always struggled with the idea in my head of essentially two big questions. One big question was that in this, what's the story here? Is it everything that happened in Safdar's life? I knew, instinctively, that that was not the story, I had to find a format. Therefore, the subtitle of the book, ‘The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi’. I was very clear that I would begin with the attack on the first of January, that's where the narration begins. And I'll go up to the forth and talk about my early days in JANAM. Then retrace the story, go back in time, and then come right back to December 1988. As soon as that architecture was clear in my head, then everything else just flowed. It was just a matter of writing. Of course, I did a whole ton of interviews, research. 

 

Marginalia: 

How did you decide what part you would play in the book?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

I knew I was going to be a character in the book because I was part of the story but I didn't know how to write about myself. So I had to find a position outside myself to recognize that the person that I am today is not the person I was then. I hope there's a very deep recognition of that. This is not to say that I'm better or worse, but I'm just not the same person. So it also became a way in which to investigate: how did Safdar change me? I was a kid who came into JANAM with my own preoccupations, preconceptions, vices, arrogances. And then meeting Safdar, not just Safdar, but being in JANAM, being in the Communist movement, and then eventually joining the Communist Party, all of those things changed me significantly. So it's possible for me now to look back and write about that kid, in a way in which I can't write about myself today. If I had to write about the Sudhanva Deshpande that I am today, I wouldn't be able to write so dispassionately about this person. So the writing exercise was also an exercise of self-discovery, which was unanticipated, I didn't think it could end up being that but it did and it was fun. I enjoyed looking back at that guy.

 

Marginalia: Can we go back to those 45 days? What were they like for you? 

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Sudhanva Deshpande: I took an off from everything else. My parents are dead, but they have a little apartment in Pune. So I went to Pune and I stayed in that apartment and I wrote every day and I was writing, reading, and researching for about 16 hours a day every day, just truly immersed in this and not doing anything else not talking to friends, nothing, just doing this. So, this takes up to three weeks, roughly, rest of the time I was in Delhi and I was working. So I was doing LeftWord work, I was doing JANAM work, Studio Safdar work. During this 45-day period, we even had a four-day tour of Bombay with performances.

 

Marginalia: 

What did you think of your own first draft, 25 years in the thinking, 45 days in the making?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

I was okay with the first draft; by then knew that I had something. I didn't share it with anyone for a long time because I was so much in the writing process, and I didn't want to get distracted by any comments, my brain was working in a certain way.  And so it's only when I was half way through part two, I shared it with my friend, comrade and colleague, Vijay Prasad, who's a fantastic writer himself. So he was the first person I shared half the draft with, when I was fairly confident and thought that it was okay to get some reaction. And it's only after I finished writing the whole draft, that I shared it with some people.  

 

Marginalia: 

Who were the audiences in your mind?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

For me, the fact that people your age are responding to the book so warmly gives me a huge sense of gratification for two reasons. One is that I truly and fully admire the role that is being played by students today, in the country. I'm deeply inspired by young people around me and I say, ‘Wow, I wish I had been like this’. But also, in my writing, I was very clear about the audience.  One of the things I decided from the word go, is that I'm not going to write for my friends, fellow travellers, people who've been part of JANAM, people from the Left movement, intellectuals, historians, theatre people. I'm writing for young people who want to make a difference today. So there’s this whole emphasis in the book on organization, that you need to get organized, and how organization work happens. The fact is organization work, political work, creative work, and artistic work, all these are connected, but people often don’t give enough importance to organization. It's the artistic work that gets the eyeballs.  But it's really this invisible work of daily organizing that builds movements. And for me the act of writing the book was very much about trying to communicate some of this to young people. And hence a whole section on the strike, on how the working class gets organized. So the fact that somebody like you responds to the book so warmly, is something that is of great importance to me.

 

Marginalia: 

What has the journey of JANAM been like, post-Safdar Hashmi. 

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

That's a question that requires a long detailed answer. But I think one of the things that one has to realize is that Safdar was very crucial to JANAM in many different ways. It wasn't just at the artistic level that he was as important. It's not easy for any organization to lose a person like him even if we had had a whole team of leadership at the time, which we didn't. Even in that situation to lose somebody like Safdar is a huge loss because he just brings so much more to the table every time with everything that he does. Not everybody has the capability. His death set us back by at least 10 years, if not more, and that loss is something that I don't think I've ever reconciled myself. I'll never be okay. We have not moved on. It's something that I want to hold close to myself and I will never move on in some ways,  in other ways, practically speaking, we do move on. 

So if Safdar was like a palm with five fingers, then you had to find one person to pick each of these fingers. Whereas he had all five fingers, none of us had that. I think the fact that Mala [Moloyshree Roy, Safdar Hashmi’s wife] was there was the biggest reason why JANAM stuck together. She was not just the glue in the emotional sense, because that's never been part of who she is. But I think Mala has always been a fantastic organizer, after Safdar's death she became the organization backbone. So I think Mala's presence and a critical role at that time, to hold us together, to give us a very clear political groundedness and direction was very crucial to JANAM. 

 

Marginalia: 

In the book, you mention Moloyshree Hashmi’s role as not being evident to many people, but Safdar Hashmi always recognized it. How do you see her role after his death? 

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

Well as I mentioned in the book, though, I haven't gone into much detail about that. But there was a group of people in JANAM at that time, a lot of so called senior people. They all left us about a year after Safdar's killing. It was very unpleasant because they went to a press conference and that kind of stuff. But in one sense, I was actually quite glad that it happened. I had felt like they're dragging the organization down. This gave many of us the opportunity to come into our own.  Mala was the most amazing leader, she enabled a lot of things to happen, she gives a lot of space to young people to come forward. She's very encouraging, she's extremely critical. And you can never assume that because you have now become a certain age and have been around for a certain time you won't get a critical take from Mala. The great thing about Mala is that there is a consistency in her behaviour. It doesn't matter who it is, she behaves the same way with everybody. So you get no feeling that there is any favouritism. 

 

Marginalia: 

As someone who's seen him work so closely, what do you think were the qualities that made him Safdar Hashmi the person he was?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

Safdar had a knack of connecting with people across age groups, across social distinctions. Even now, you meet so many old comrades, you know, when they talk about Safdar they talk about him with such fondness. I saw him again and again, interacting with so many different types of people, whether it was theatre people, whether it was JANAM members, whether it was our comrades from trade unions or women's organizations, or they were professionals like journalists, doctors lawyers, he knew a whole range of people. And one could just see that this was a guy who just made connections  just like that, and there was no sense of you know, "Oh let me make friends with this guy because he’s important!" There's one line in my book where I say that Safdar was not a networker, he was an organizer. There's a crucial difference. When you're networking, you're looking at people with the view to taking advantage of them; when you're organizing, you're looking at people in terms of how do I bring people together? I think that's a very important part of who Safdar was: he just had a natural connection with people.

 

Marginalia: 

Safdar Hashmi was so involved with the times he lived in. How do you think he would have received all of what is going on around us today?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

There's no question about it, he would have been right in the thick of it, 100%, anti-CAA, anti-NRC protests, Farmers’ protest. I mean, all it, but there's something that I truly miss. When Safdar died, it was the early days of the beginning of the home video revolution. VHS players were coming into people's homes, for the first time. There was no sense of the internet, there was no broadband. I think he would have taken to things like the mobile phone, Twitter very naturally. I can't imagine the kind of little songs he would have written, little films he would have made, done commentary, he would have totally loved it. Sadly, that never happened.

 

Marginalia: 

Do you think the impact his death had across the country had something to do with how JANAM reacted, how JANAM decided to go back and perform the same play at the same place?

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

Well, in any such instance, there's a combination of many things that come together. Safdar's killing was not the only killing of its time that happened. Avtar Singh Pash, the poet, was killed around the same time. Shankar Guha Niyogi, the trade unionist, was also killed. But there was something about Safdar's killing that catapulted the whole thing to a different level altogether, it became a pan-India thing. This is also point I've made in passing in the book, I think the fact that Safdar came from an organized movement was important, CPI (M), and its various front organizations, trade unions, women’s organisations, all of these organizations took the name of Safdar in what he stood for, to the people in a big way. The other thing is Safdar himself was very well thought of, in the artistic and intellectual community in Delhi. The fact that he was so well connected amongst journalists, lawyers, intellectuals, artists, many of them thought of him very highly. That also became an important factor. Thirdly, I think just the timing of the fact that it happened in early 1989. At that time there was a larger discontent against the Congress regime. So there's a whole set of factors. Now, in all of this, the fact that we went back and performed, that became a symbolic moment, a galvanizing moment. When I say that it became a galvanizing moment, it means that it set in motion many things, a lot of the protests that happened subsequently, were inspired by that moment of JANAM going back and performing. And in that the fact that Mala led us, she was personally there and active, all of that was important to making that moment.

 

Marginalia: 

Did it change something for the artists across the country too? 

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Sudhanva Deshpande: 

I think the fact that so many artists and intellectuals came together and formed the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, SAHMAT, was important. The work that SAHMAT did in subsequent times, for the next three decades or so, and which it continues to do today, that's really significant. It became a platform that pulled together many different people. The fact that this platform was seen as being larger than the left moment, was also important. It had wider appeal, more people came on the platform without necessarily being a  part of the left. The big thing that happened was that cultural, organized, cultural protest took a certain shape and form in 1989 after Safdar's killing in a way in which it had never done this was unprecedented. This was never before and that was really important.