Power play: Sharmila Chauhan’s ‘The Husbands’

March 18 2014

Review of the play where women can marry more than one man and hold all the power…

By Suman Bhuchar

IT IS REALLY strange to see a show where the arguments traditionally associated with women roles are now being articulated from the mouths of men.

That is the case in the new play “The Husbands”, by Sharmila Chauhan who has set her story in the community of Shaktipur in South India, in a distant future where the gender roles are reversed and transgressed.

The men stay at home and make the chapattis while the ‘woman’ leads the community and asserts her will over the two house husbands.

They have no freedom to roam wherever they want and ‘fast’ for ‘the health of my wife, the abundance of harvest’.

Aya (a very husky Syreeta Kumar – pictured below), is about to take another husband and it’s the day before the wedding.

Her current husbands, Sem (Rhik Samadder, Husband Number One) and Omar (Mark Theodore, Husband Number Two) are observing a fast while they prepare the feast for the forthcoming nuptials.

Surprisingly, they live in brotherly harmony and feel no jealousy when Aya showers kisses on one and affectionate words on the other.

It becomes apparent that their role has been delineated – one to keep the house and the other to make babies.

Chauhan has borrowed ideas from the Nair community of South India which practices polyandry and is matriarchal.

Aya is a woman used to doing things her way – she’s totally in control and can use her feminine wiles to get what she wants. What is really amazing is that the men know their place and when displeased seek refuge in ‘sulking’. They prostrate themselves before her (although she is against the custom), and never raise their voice. You wonder where all the testosterone has gone!
Chauhan has written this play as a response to the growing problem of female foeticide & female infanticide currently affecting India.

She has created an entirely imaginary world and has thought of everything – this is a gated community, where girls are looked after and revered, not kidnapped and sold off like elsewhere. They live to produce more girls in order to correct the gender balance. She has a very poetic way of storytelling and it’s enjoyable to listen to, but is this any more utopian?

At first, all is happy and joyous in the household – but then a stranger arrives in their midst and upsets this balance.

This is Jerome (Philip Edgerley), a Western academic who wants to take the ideas of Shaktipur to the wider world. He can appeal to Aya in a way that her two husbands cannot.

This is where the real arguments of the play get going – Aya, is ambitious and has clear plans for her community – the marriage is purely political in order to spread her message to the big city.

However, she soon discovers (for reasons of the plot, we will not reveal it in this review) that her plan cannot be carried out in the way she may have envisaged it.

Although the overall argument is not totally resolved  – this is another challenging and thought provoking work from producers, Kali Theatre.

**** (four stars out of five)

*Interview with Sharmila Chauhan

*The Husbands by Sharmila Chauhan is on until March 23 at Soho Theatre,  21 Dean Street London W1D3NE. Tickets here