Yaël Farber's Nirbhaya shatters the silence on sexual violence in India and beyond

Playwright Yaël Farber mourned and protested after the Delhi bus rape. Then she visited India and gathered more stories

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      They called her Nirbhaya, Hindi for “fearless”, when the media first reported the 23-year-old’s brutal gang rape and torture aboard a New Delhi bus in 2012. The details were so shocking, so horrifying, that the assault made headlines around the world.

      They dispensed with anonymity when Jyoti Singh Pandey died a few weeks later from the injuries inflicted by her six attackers. The global response was swift, the uprising swelled by rage and a sense of “enough”. There were protests and calls to action to stop violence against women, social-media campaigns to destigmatize the shame that’s often associated with sexual assault, and demands for increased accountability: of perpetrators, governments, and judicial systems.

      Award-winning playwright and director Yaël Farber mourned and protested like many modern people, via Facebook. Poorna Jagannathan, a New York City– and Mumbai-based actor who was familiar with Farber’s powerful background in testimonial theatre, saw the post and invited her to come to Mumbai and make a theatre piece about sexual and gender-based violence.

      “Women are ready to speak here in India in the wake of this rape and death,” Jagannathan reportedly told Farber. “Come here and create work that enables us to break the silence.”

      Farber accepted the invitation and headed to Mumbai, her five-year-old daughter in tow. They lived with Jagannathan for a month, a critical time of research and development for the South African–born theatre artist.

      “What I was interested in was, why was this a breaking point? Why did people suddenly feel the need to take to the streets? What was it about the specificity of her [Pandey’s] story that had unleashed, finally, an appropriate level of outrage towards what is happening around the world?” Farber says, over the phone from her current home in Montreal.

      But by the time she arrived in Mumbai, the public outcry had already lessened, so the creation process took on an even greater sense of urgency.

      “We all know there’s only a certain amount of time these stories retain a sensitivity,” Farber says. “It’s a tough world we live in and it’s full of sad stories and things happen that are beyond the imagination, and so when that aperture opens, very briefly for a time when people actually shed their numbness and feel, there’s a window that you have to slip through if you’re going to create traction forward. Every time I spoke to people, there was a sense of how things could so easily slide back to a sense of complacency that we have around the world towards sexual violence.”

      Nirbhaya is Farber’s guard against that complacency. The play, which debuted in 2013 and won the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award and was a New York Times critics’ pick this past May, positions Pandey’s story as its narrative spine and from that helps five Indian actors, including Jagannathan, reveal their own personal experiences of sexual and gender-based violence.

      Farber cast Jagannathan and Priyanka Bose while she was in Mumbai. She also put out a call looking for women, actors and nonactors, who were ready to tell their stories of sexual and gender-based violence. Farber’s process, from screening to auditioning to creation, is very specific; she’s conscientious about the sometimes fine line between exploitation and empowerment.

      “Every single decision that is made and what goes onto our stage, they [the actors] are complicit in terms of their own testimonies,” Farber says. “Of course, that’s not easy.” A survivor may be resistant to including a certain aspect of their story in the work, because often that’s where the shame resides. “But this is never something that can be forced or rushed. It can only be a very guided process and everything that ends up up there is about them taking action.”

      The screening process involved a series of deeply probing questions. There were people whose stories were perfect for Nirbhaya, but Farber had to pass them over. She could tell who would ultimately feel blindsided by the process—both the six-week intensive in New Delhi, where they would create during the day and Farber would write at night, and the subsequent performances—which would result in feelings of exploitation.

      “It’s a very harrowing journey to go on,” Farber says. “I’m a playmaker, I’m not a therapist, and that was always very, very important that I made it very clear: this is not a therapeutic process. It can become some kind of enormous sense of camaraderie to begin to speak, but we are making a piece of theatre and if we have any ideas beyond that, I would not be worthy as a leader.”

      Farber has worked in testimonial theatre for 15 years. She calls it social activism, a place for true storytellers, where you offer to tell your story so everybody can understand their own stories better.

      “As one testimony builds onto another, we start to understand that God is in the details, we empathize with somebody when we understand the details of their life,” Farber says. “I did not just want to make a piece, and neither did Poorna, about just Jyoti Singh Pandey, because the whole point was that it was not an anomaly. It was not an unusual event. The brutality of it shocked people, it was very effective and made it stand out, but this is happening everywhere, every day, all over the world.”

      When Pandey’s rape and murder first made headlines, there was also a tremendous amount of racist conversation around the attack. Farber says it was critical to Nirbhaya’s architecture that they included at least one story that happened outside India. The fifth testimony in Nirbhaya is from a woman who was raped in Montreal.

      “One night in the postshow talk, people were talking about Indian women and she said, ‘This didn’t happen to me because I’m an Indian woman, and neither did this happen to me by a man of any particular ethnic persuasion, this happened to me because I’m a woman and he needed to enact his violence on me,’” Farber recalls. “There’s a tendency to distance ourselves from what makes up the fabric of sexual violence and gender-based violence within our societies, but it’s pernicious and it’s everywhere.”

      Nirbhaya presents painful, lived women’s experiences, but sexual, gender-based violence isn’t just a woman’s issue, Farber says. “It’s a human-rights issue. If you believe in human rights, there is no other way to cut it, the neglect of this issue in the world and at these epidemic proportions is a violation of human rights.”

      The Cultch and Diwali Fest present Nirbhaya at the York Theatre from November 3 to 14.

      Comments