Decolonizing and Producing Working-class Theatre in Pakistan: The Poetics and Politics of Sangat Theatre’s Chog Kusumbhey Di (Picking Safflower)

Abstract: This article aims to map out the features of political theatre in the contemporary post-colonial society of Pakistan, with a focus on the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Though there were some sporadic developments in the earlier period, a relatively organized political theatre movement, with its ideological underpinnings within the leftist project, started in the 1980s as a response to General Zal ul Haq’s dictatorship. However, it lost its resistive fervor and performative activism due to the neo-liberalization of theatre under NGO projects. The pioneering companies of this movement in Punjab, namely Ajoka (1983) and Punjab Lok Rahs (1986), started working on the development projects of national and international donors. Their politics of resistance against the local and international dictatorial and imperialist regimes transformed into the neoliberal politics of rights, justice and advocacy, dictated by the hegemonic agendas of Western corporations, imperialist governments and think tanks of the Global North (Abbas 2023:360). This phenomenon occurred with almost all theatre companies of the 1980s in Lahore. In this context, the question arises of whether political theatre is possible in contemporary Pakistan, and if so, in what form. This article explores this question by examining the case of Sangat Theatre in order to draw a picture of an alternative aesthetic reality for political theatre that exists outside the realm of NGO influence. At the same time, by focusing on certain decolonial approaches in theatre-making and performance, the article helps to decolonize theatre scholarship and offers an understanding of working-class theatre production in a postcolonial reality.