Moloyashree Hashmi (1953 — Present)

One single actor plays the role of several women ; the school-going child, the young woman who is married to patriarchal rules; the young woman who wants to pursue higher education under unending societal pressures; the woman who is subjected to sexual harassment at her first job interview; the woman who is arrested for joining a demonstration against unemployment; the worker woman who is helpless and impoverished but finds strength in being part of a larger struggle, the housewife who is subjected to physical and emotional abuse by an alcoholic husband, the worker woman who begins to question her rights when she is thrown out of her job by a factory owner.

All these women, and more, were played by one actress — Moloyashree Hashmi, as part of the iconic play Aurat (woman). First performed in 1979, the charged politics Aurat flagged off the first conference of working women under the aegis of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the trade union wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Considered to be one of the first of such conferences in India, the venue was an unfinished building in Rup Nagar, a conservative middle class neighbourhood in North Delhi. Moloyashree, who was only twenty five years old at the time, brought to life the radically feminist play written by Safdar Hashmi and Rakesh Saxena.

Janam (?, theatre group) performed the play hundreds of times over the next two decades, especially during extensive tours of North India in the 1980s.

They performed all kinds of locations, from the open fields in Haryana where they performed to audiences of hundreds of villagers who both sat and stood in a circle around the play, to the sprawling grounds of Pragati Maidan in Delhi while different expos and trade shows like the Internation Trade Fair took place. In colleges such as Zakir Hussain College, one of Delhi’s oldest educational institutions the old, colonial era building in the trading quarter of old Delhi, to ‘resettlement colonies’ set up after the Emergency (1975–77), which saw a major reconfiguration of Delhi’s urban topography, to hidden slum clusters of the national capital such as the South Delhi slum Kusumpur Pahadi which was right next door to the posh Vasant Vihar.

As the play was translated into several languages and performed by different theatre groups across the country in the past few decades, Aurat became an symbolic play for the women’s movement and Moloyashree’s name became a key figure in the feminist as well as theatre movement in India.