Uru Art Harbour hosts a 50-year-old play Thuramugham that is set in the Cochin Port

The play is being directed by Gopan Chidambaram the son of the playwright K M Chidambaran
Uru Art Harbour hosts a 50-year-old play Thuramugham that is set in the Cochin Port

The fact is, Fort Kochi is a ghost of what it used to be. Like many other port cities in the country, the Queen of the Arabian Sea has forgotten its busy trading days and has become a tourist destination. Thuramugham, a play written by K M Chidambaran, is a rare literary document that chronicles the past of the then Cochin Port. 

Penned 50 years ago, the play finds a resurrection through the playwright’s son Gopan Chidambaram. “Thuramugham was popular in the play-reading sessions in the 1970s and I remember it winning the Kerala Sahitya Parishad award in 1973, but it was hardly staged. Luckily, we found an extant copy of the script in a library and decided to stage it as the city’s port celebrates its 90th anniversary,” says Gopan, who is a faculty of drama at the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit.

Pains of existence
Opened in 1928, the harbour was the hope of the local population to receive rewarding employment. But, evil systems like chappa (where the employer would throw copper coins as the workers scramble and fight for it to get work) ate away their dreams.

“This play is one of the very few literary records of the 1953 Mattancherry firing incident in which three people named Saidu, Saithalavi, and Antony were killed. The script even has references to real characters who were involved in the incidents,” informs the director, who is renowned for his script for the movie Iyobinte Pusthakam

The 140-minute theatrical tells the tale of the proletariat through chief characters namely Hamsa, Moidu, and their relatives including their sister Kadeesha. The director ropes in local people (instead of professional actors) and makes use of minimal stage design to present the lives of harbour employees which were cordoned off by a hopeless darkness.

Politics of abandonment
Co-produced by Uru Art Harbour and Collective Phase One (a producers’ collective that includes the likes of sound engineer Resul Pookutty and director Rajeev Ravi), the showcase also encompasses a bigger politics, according to Gopan.

“It explores how a harbour shapes the culture of a city. Negating the long social processes involved in the creation of a port town, we created a parallel town called Ernakulam and abandoned a space for great cultural exchange. In a sense, we’ve closed ourselves to the world,” says this playwright turned director, who has won a state award for the play Sadrishyavakyangal. 

At Uru Art Harbour on July 21 and 22
At 6.30 pm

 

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