Play Breaks Silence about Sexual Assault in India

Nirbhaya, a new play focuses to break the silence about sexual violence to tackle infamous gang rape in India.

Nirbhaya means “fearless one” – a name the Indian press gave Pandey, who desperately fought back against her attackers.

Jyoti Singh Pandey, is a 23-year-old student in New Delhi who was gang raped in 2012 on her way home with a friend from the movies, was brutally raped and beaten with an iron rod by six men aboard a bus, then left naked, for dead, by the side of the road. She died days later from internal injuries. The incident spurred angry protests across India.

The play Nirbhaya goes beyond Pandey’s true life story, but also having the actors themselves tell us their own, real-life stories of abuse.


With very simple and conservative settings, five performers out of seven performers share their own personal stories of sexual assault, which they said they felt compelled to share after hearing Pandey’s unfortunate story. The stories are horrific, involving beatings, break-ins, child abuse. One woman was set on fire by her husband in India and still bears the scars on her face.

The details of the story made some of the audience and actors cry: the smell of queen of the night flowers mixed with a sweaty man’s musk, the “malignant poisonous pleasure” one woman feels as she is attacked, and the son who tells his mother her badly burned skin is “beautiful like a baby, all pink or new.” a performer invoked Chandi, the warrior goddess, saying that, for Jyoti’s and for her own abuse, she “wanted to tear shit apart.” Uhmmmmmmm.....

There is just one male actor (Ankur Vikal) to play the roles of both aggressor and consoler. In many scenes he plays the male abuser, but he also plays parts like the little brother who comforts his young sister after she has been abused, again, in their bed. Vikal plays Jyoti’s attackers, but he also plays her male friend, who went with her to the movies, and desperately tried to stop her from being raped and killed on the bus that night. In this casting there is the chilling feeling that even men close to us can be a threat, and that any woman, and at any time, can become a victim.

This play began out of a Facebook message that Poorna Jagannathan, the play’s producer and one of its performers, sent to Farber after the protests over Jyoti’s assault first began. Jagannathan said that she felt “complicit in her silence” over her own abuse, and wanted to do something about it.

“The gift of this play is that it’s not fucking palatable,” says one of the performers-Pamela Sinha. She is definitely right....

Source: Bedfordandbowery