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All about Power

Yatin Upadhyay, a Parthapur, Rajasthan based social activist and performance artist recently converted a Dusserah ground into a field of performance. His latest performance titled ‘Maro’ was a huge hit and it talked about acquiring, sharing and exercising power, reports Artconcerns correspondent.

On 21st October 2007 the people in north India celebrated Dusserah, a festival that celebrates the victory of Lord Rama over the demon king Ravan. Huge effigies of Ravan, his brother Kumbhakarn and son Mekhnaad are made out of bamboo and paper, they are filled with crackers and by sunset they are all burnt. But this time, the village folk in Parthapur, Rajasthan saw different kind of effigy standing in the middle of a ground where the effigies of the evil kings were placed. A huge white shirt was erected on a bamboo pole and a person asked the people to throw balloons filled with colored water once he ‘went inside’ the shirt.

The person who did this performative act is Yatin Upadhyay, secretary of Banishwar Lok Vikas Sansthan’ (Banishwar People’s Development Organisation), an NGO working in Parthapur. Yatin Upadhyay is not an artist, if we go by its popular definitions. He has been active in the area as an organizer, a street theatre performer and as an educator for almost a decade. People know him as ‘Lala’ (our own boy). Every time, he does a performance, they try to learn from it, first with skepticism, then with love.

Dusserah celebrations mean a lot to the people in Parthapur. “I wanted to tell them about how power operates in a society. Actually, people are just passive spectators when a Ravan effigy is burnt. After electing the ‘rulers’ through democratic voting system, people turn passive. They just become spectators. I wanted to tell them that they too had a share in what you call ‘power’,” Yatin explains.

When Yatin went into the shirt, people hesitated to throw balloons at him. “But I exhorted them to do it. One by one they came and threw at me mildly. Then the things changed. They were all caught in a frenzy and started throwing balloons at me, even without thinking once that I might get hurt,” Yatin says.

That is what exactly Yatin wanted to happen. When the power is handed over to the people, after the initial hesitation they would exercise it most vehemently, sometimes without discretion. And Yatin wanted to explain this factor to them. Acquiring, sharing and exercising power is all about discretion. Once the power is acquired, as history tells us, the erstwhile oppressed could turn into oppressors. And that is what happened exactly at Parthapur Dusserah ground.

“It is not about mob psychology alone, where people do things as they are driven by collective frenzy. I want to talk about the conscious choice of using and abusing of power. After coming out of the shirt I talked to people about it and they were embarrassed. I believe, understanding this embarrassment is very important. This is what keeps them away from power and keeps them docile. Overcoming it means resorting to violent means. There is an in between space where power could be understood in its right sense,” says the artist.

Yatin calls this performance “Maro’, which means ‘Beat It’. It is at once a war cry and an order. Order turns into a war cry and vice versa. The spectacle of colors (a surrogate to blood shedding) intoxicates people as in consumer malls and in war fields. Yatin wants to experiment with newer but closer to home forms of performances and convey this idea to the people of Rajasthan. An artist who likes to stay in villages, Yatin has been working as an organizer for the Sandarbh Project and has incorporated his performances in the project along with the academically trained artists.