It was a journey back to the colonial days for the audience who turned up at Olive Bar & Kitchen at One Style Mile, Mehrauli, for the launch of Mehmood Farooqui’s Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857 , on Thursday evening.
Capturing the famed sepoy rebellion of 1857, in its evocative spirit and passion was a dramatised reading from the book, a translation of documents originally written in Persian and Urdu, by theatre personality Danish Husain. He was so carried away that at one point he expressed his desire to play the role of the commander- inchief of the rebellion army on stage. “ It will be amazing to play the role of an army chief who had the power to blow up anyone who didn’t comply with orders,” said Husain.
The book, which took four years of painstaking research to complete, includes fascinating accounts from the court of the soldiers, letters from soldiers threatening to leave Delhi if they were not paid salaries, and reports of troublesome courtesans, spies, fakir s and harassed policemen.
“ The challenge was in making sense of the documents written in Shikastah Urdu, an archaic language,” said Farooqui, who was accompanied by his filmmaker wife Anusha Rizvi. The debutant director, however, declined to talk about Peepli Live, her forthcoming satire that was celebrated at the Sundance festival earlier this year, thereby ensuring that the attention remained focused on her husband.
“ The period (1857) is as significant as 1947, yet it is hardly being looked into with the kind of seriousness and significance it deserves,” she said.
Meanwhile, Farooqui who is also the co-director of Peepli Live , did not rule out coming up with a film based on his work. The reading was followed by a rendering from Rahi Masoom Raza’s epic poem on 1857 by noted historian Shahid Amin.
0 comments:
Post a Comment