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Amitava Kumar

When the hawa blows, the cradle will rock

In Tim Robbins's recent film, The Cradle Will Rock, actors under the direction of Orson Welles are working on the production of Marc Blitzstein's play of the same name. The play is about workers and unions in a place called Steeltown.

When the theater is closed following a scare about communism, this play about workers and unions is staged anyway. In another theater, without costumes. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock....

The Cradle Will Rock is performed in front of a full house with a roused audience. For several minutes, you are allowed to believe that such glorious acts could bring down not only the house but also the capitalist state. That was in the days of the Great Depression, when there was enormous poverty and suffering.

And now? The film's closing shot, cutting to the present moment, shows Times Square now owned by wealthy barons with Mickey Mouse ears. That moment passes and when the credits roll up, we hear again the song of the prostitute who can feel a nickel under her heel, but when she bends down to pick it up she finds nothing.

When I came out of the newly renovated theater where the film was being screened, there were very few people around. There couldn't have been more than 10 people watching that film with me. For a moment, standing in the sunny parking lot, I wanted to address my audience of cars.

What could I tell them? Perhaps only that the number of people watching radical art in any given week in my town were perhaps less than the number recruited to sell beer to the crowd watching football at the University stadium.

Aren't ordinary Americans interested in hearing stories -- especially tales told well, as The Cradle Will Rock no doubt is -- that present the follies, the struggles, the petty vanities, and the huge heroism of many of the lives around us?

In one scene in the film, we watch the young Nelson Rockefeller venting his anger at the art of Diego Rivera. The steel magnates, who are happy conducting business with Mussolini's fascist government, help Rockefeller decide what is the right kind of art. Color and forms, they declare. The art of Matisse.

I was reminded suddenly of the South African artist, Robert Hodgins, who living and painting under apartheid, commented: "Matisse lived through the two world wars. Do you see that in his work? Maybe he was registering the Germans marching down the Champs Elysées even while he was painting his hundred-and thirty-first goldfish."

Standing at the top of the double row of shiny cars in the theater's parking lot, I thought of a small audience that I enjoy every week: the students in my classes at the University of Florida.

I'm sure my students have, as I do too, an interest in goldfishes or, for that matter, in beer and football.

But, they also have a desire, and I do too, to understand and speak about our conditions of work, or about history and wars, or genuine social change.

How is one to do both? How is one to have beer and history at the same time? Perhaps by understanding the Brechtian dictum: 'In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times.'

That was a lesson that was understood very well by Safdar Hashmi, whose death anniversary was observed in New Delhi and elsewhere in India last month.

I remember reading about Hashmi in the New York Times in the early days of 1989. I was a graduate student living in a small, attic apartment in Minneapolis.

It was bitterly cold. One evening, I descended from the attic to cook supper after my landlady had eaten, as was my custom: rice and Progresso lentil soup, disguised with a few basic spices to taste a bit like dal. When I sat down at the kitchen table, I saw the day's paper. My landlady had marked a news item with her blue pencil:

'Street Dramatist in India Slain Over Play'

The story began: 'A leftist who was one of India's most popular street theater directors was beaten to death by thugs last weekend after he refused a politician's demand to stop a drama in support of an opposing candidate, witnesses said.'

That was Safdar Hashmi. I had watched his plays with great interest in India, before I came to this country; in the two years prior to his death, I had written poems which I hoped to emulate the didacticism and the wit that were the hallmark of Hashmi's plays. Now, I sat looking at the newspaper photograph of his corpse. Around him, illuminated by the light of the Delhi morning, stood many progressive intellectuals whose faces I recognized. I do not think I had ever felt as alone as I did that evening in my landlady's kitchen.

I will not claim that Safdar was a friend of mine, although I had exchanged greetings with him at the bus stop, or at his street performances at Delhi University.

He had an easy charm and a handsome face, and his talent was legendary. He was only nine years older than me, and he had provided me a model for the writer I wanted to become in the future. Even in Minnesota, in a brief obituary, I caught a glimpse of what had made him so inspiring:

'Mr Hashmi was popular for brief, biting satires that made fun of corrupt politicians, policemen and businessmen, which drew laughter and cheers from large audiences of industrial workers ... His plays... moved from the propagandist dramas of the early 1970s to subtler themes.'

Safdar's killing unleashed a wave of grief and rage in India. The funeral procession was a nine-mile-long serpent of artists, workers, students -- people from every fragment of a fragmented nation. The play that had been interrupted by his murder was performed on the first anniversary of his death in towns and cities throughout India. Safdar's wife, Moloyashree, was also a member of Jan Natya Manch, Safdar's theater troupe. She told a Hindi newspaper: 'I am frequently being asked what I think is the meaning of Safdar's not being any more. It seems to me that my loss is not very different from the loss that is Jan Natya Manch's and the Centre for Indian Trade Union's. That emptiness is mine too. Apart from that, the private pain that is that of a friend, and of a wife -- that is something I do not want to share with everyone.'

A few years ago, Safdar's mother, Qamar Hashmi, published a tribute to her son. That book is entitled The Fifth Flame. The unaffected humanity of the mother's biography of her dead son reminds the reader of the very ordinary ways in which a sense of decency and a will to struggle is instilled in families throughout India and beyond. It is a testament to the things that children learn from the thwarted ambitions of their fathers and from the resourcefulness and persistence of their mothers.

Hashmi's book made me nostalgic. And I was reminded of it when I saw The Cradle Will Rock.

'Hashmi's triumph,' one journalist wrote after his death, 'was that he reached the people. Perhaps that is the one sin the political hoodlum will not forgive in an intellectual.' As we learn from Robbins's film, the Federal Theater Project was shut down because it had begun to reach 25 million audiences. That figure is stunning. It also explains why the people's art movement was considered such a danger by the status-quoists in the Roosevelt Congress.

What is the difference between Hashmi and the Indian writers celebrated in the US or England? Let's begin with one simple fact of location: Safdar Hashmi received his mail in the offices of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) at Vithalbhai Patel House; most Indian writers based in the West, among whom I count myself, have addresses only in the English departments and creative writing programs of American universities.

Safdar had thought of theater as that which 'brings people closer to fighting organizations.' Will the West's favorite Indian writers ever find institutions that can mobilize the south Asian community in the US?

And what Tim Robbins compels us to ask is whether the AFL-CIO or the cultural wing of the American government come looking for the immigrant scribes to write about the desis who toil as cabdrivers, nannies, garment workers and non-contract laborers?

When the hawa blows, the cradle will rock?

Amitava Kumar is the author of Passport Photos, soon forthcoming from the University of California Press.

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