Mahmood Farooqui is an acclaimed writer and performer known for reviving Dastangoi, the lost art of Urdu storytelling. He has received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Besieged: Voices From Delhi-1857. He has been visiting fellow at the University of Michigan and University of California, Berkeley. Mahmood has co-directed Peepli Live and produced The Great Shamsuddin Family. In this conversation, he discusses ‘The Tihar Players’. Excerpts from the interview:Q: Let’s start with the art of storytelling. A: When I began work on reviving this or studying about it, I had never seen anyone perform Dastangoi because the last Dastango passed away in 1928. I was very blessed to have the scholarship and the guidance of the great Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, one of the greatest writers, novelists, critics and poets that modern Urdu, or indeed modern India, has produced. But he had also never seen somebody perform. So when we tried to put up the first show, we had the stories, but we had nothing to emulate or no model. So it was really our intuition… that put together the first modern show… And of course, the stories themselves were phenomenal. You know, the story, the fantasies of tricksters and sorcerers, nothing of that kind of imagination and fertility and fecundity has been written anywhere in the world, as far as I know… And then, of course, I started writing my own stories, I started doing workshops. So today, 21 years later, we have. Now the word ‘dastan’ is back in the currency of our usage in a huge way… We live in a multicultural society. We live in a multilingual society. So any text that I approach, whether I’m working on the Mahabharata or the Ramayana,… many writers in different languages, many literatures have worked on those things. So whenever we present the Mahabharata, people are startled that there are so many versions of the Gita in Urdu or the Mahabharata in Urdu or in Persian, there are so many poems to odes to Lord Krishna, similarly for Ramayana. It’s all our legacy. The world of Sanskrit, the world of Persian, the world of Urdu, the world of medieval Hindi. And we bring all that together in the spoken word… Q: When you were in Tihar prison, you put together a motley crowd of amateur actors, many of them illiterate, and you had nothing, and yet you brought this about. Let’s talk about that. A: I had to do something which in prison terms in India is called mashakkat — rigorous imprisonment. So I went to the education ward and I proposed that I should set up a theatre class… You might think, what is the point of this? You know, my case is more important. I’m very tortured, as everybody in prison is. You know, everybody is suffering. Everybody has got a plethora of problems because there are court cases to deal with, there are families to deal with. There are problems inside prison. There is food, there is medical health. So amongst all those problems and preoccupations, if somebody’s saying, come and do theatre with me, it seems a little odd… And then people started getting into it with workshops. When I started, you know, getting them to play out scenes from their own life, from their prison life, then they started enjoying the catharsis… I would consider myself immensely blessed and fortunate that I could see them grow as actors grow in confidence. And it did wonders to their own self esteem. Many of them have benefited from it. Now they’re outside, they’re working, whether as instructors, public speakers or you know, photographers. And also it did wonders to the atmosphere inside prison because a prison is a very coercive space… We were fighting not so much to be artists, but to restore our own humanity and to find dignity which came to us on stage, which came to us as performers when we saw the gleam in people’s eyes, when we saw that for moments when we were doing the Ram Leela, people forgot about everything that was troubling them and they were lost in it. Q: How does the language of the performance shift? A: I took a Premchand Munshi called ‘Nasha’ which we improvised completely. It was a device play. So we brought in a lot of prison lingo…When we did ‘Charandas Chor’, I tried to retain as much as possible the Chhattisgarhi dialect there because when that dialect was understood by people in Edinburgh, why wouldn’t people in Delhi understand it? When I did Molière, I lampoon prison doctors inside… I coined a song about paracetamol. You’re dying, you get paracetamol… All the capital and social and cultural capital that I had accumulated outside was of zilch value inside… Nothing really mattered because we had all been reduced to the bare bones of being a human being where we were all being shoved and abused, not just by authoritarian orders or officers, but also inmates. Because always, everywhere, there is a chain of violence that comes from top down, and then you replicate it, then you bully others in turn. When you are stripped of everything that you know, everything that makes your identity, how do you form your identity and where do you stand? How do you say that you know who you are? And I was lucky that my drama class began to believe in me. They began to respect me. They formed a core around me, and I was able to find a place in prison without money, without clout, which is not a mean gift, you know… And when I lived there, I realised people may have committed acts which are illegal, which are maybe reprehensible… Every day they know their families are suffering… There is disgrace, there is suffering, there is deprivation. Sometimes their children have to leave school, sometimes they have to change addresses. Their families sometimes travel hours and upon hours to just come and meet them. So a person’s conduct outside does not mean that a person has ceased to be a human being. And second, we send people to prison as punishment. So once a person is inside prison, the person has been punished because a person has been confined. A person has been deprived of their family, of food, of comfort, of a phone, of hugging their children, of hugging their dog, sitting on their chair, having a morning chai. So many everyday things and textures they’ve already been deprived of when they are inside prison.