The theatre society of a women’s college has been moral policed by the Sahitya Kala Parishad (Delhi government’s cultural wing) for performing a play with a number of words which apparently affected the cultural integrity of the society.
‘Lakshya’, a theatre group consisting of students of the Kamala Nehru college’s theatre society were performing their play named Shahira Ke Naam last Friday at the Mahavidyalaya Natya Samaroh. The performance was executed at a theatre competition organised by the Sahitya Kala Parishad. After the play ended, the organisers reportedly announced that the theatre society had been disqualified from the competition because they used certain words such as ‘bra’ and ‘panty’ which were rather a tad bit too obscene for the panel’s taste.
Justifying the performers, the theatre society’s president Radhika Dhawan said,”It is in this scene, among others, that we use words like bra and panty. And this is what the judges apparently didn’t like,”. The play includes a scene where women living in a college hostel explain how they mark their underwear so that they don’t get mixed up with others’ clothes.
“So traumatised were the organisers by the words that they choked on them and could not bring themselves to spell out those “appalling” “disgusting” words while telling us the reason for disqualification,” the college theatre society’s coordinator Monami Basu wrote in a public Facebook post. “When the students asked them, they ran away from them.”
