You may recall that in the iconic play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, it is revealed to the young prince that his father, the erstwhile king of Denmark, was murdered by his uncle Claudius and his mother Gertrude who, just three months after the funeral, entered into wedlock with the uncle ascending the throne as a usurper.

Shattered to the soul, Hamlet realises that “something is rotten in Denmark/it is an unweeded garden/things rank in nature possess it merely”.

As a reluctant crusader, Hamlet, desiring vengeance, bemoans “the cursed spite” that he should have “been born” to “set right” “the time” which he characterises as “being out of joint”.

A profoundly thinking protagonist, Hamlet rejects the impulse to carry out the correction in the customary way, namely by resorting to violence and killing the usurper uncle-king.

Instead, he thinks up the creative idea of staging a play “in which I shall catch the conscience of the king” by enacting in that play, famously titled Mousetrap, the actual facts of the act of murder committed by Claudius and Gertrude.

This he does, with stunning results; the usurper, recognising what is before him in the play, gets up to go to pray, only to bemoan how “my words go up, my thoughts remain below”.

Thus the play effectuates a transformation more telling and lasting than a mere revenge killing might have achieved.

Safdar Hashmi and our own kings

The late Safdar Hashmi was a dreamy-eyed modern-day progressive Hamlet, who, like the Shakespearean predecessor, remained committed to “set right” our own rotten times, again through the modus operandi of staging plays, not in palaces but in the streets where forgotten masses live out each day in pain and rejection.

Until, on that tragic day of January 1, 1989, lumpen stormtroopers of the powers-that-were assaulted the players in a street in Sahibabad, resulting in the death of an outstanding educationist, artist and friend of “we the people”.

An organisation called SAHMAT, named after him and his work, has since committedly sought to keep alive the memory and legacy of Safdar’s politics and of the means he used so tellingly to project emancipated ideas, namely, the agit-prop street play.

And, what with our own reversion to modern-day elected monarchies, I do not think this has been an easy commitment to carry out.

On April 12, 2025, Safdar Hashmi’s birth anniversary, SAHMAT organised a whole evening of street plays, put up by diverse groups, comprised chiefly of young, college-going students.

The evening drew a fair-sized audience, soon to be riveted to sharing imaginatively rendered enlightened critiques of our present-day social and ideological evils.

Considering the times which require of education not critical evaluations of systems of thought and practice, expressed in rational and unfettered ways, but the acquiring of skills calculated to money-making, to the accompaniment of ideational structures of propagation suited to an uncritical nationalism, the audience were clearly thankful to be witnessing a form of art that combines energy, imagination and aesthetic creativity with a rational and egalitarian humanism.

What future may await the quite brilliant young protagonists who delivered the plays must remain a matter of both conjecture and concern, given the zeitgeist, but the content of the evening’s performances gave hope yet again that when the going gets tough, the tough too get going.

Hamlet would have approved.

---