Candian NRI Rahul Varma, Co-Founder Teesri Duniya Theatre

Jan 2004

In 1984 a Union Carbide factory exploded in Bhopal India, killing three thousand people. Years later, Rahul Varma, founder of Teesri Duniya Theatre saw the documentary Bhopal Beyond Genocide in which the image of an 18-day-old baby, Zarina, appeared. Struck by her fragility and innocence, he asked himself “how would she describe her pain if she could?” “Is her silence not telling me everything I need to know,” was his answer, and from that point he began a quest to articulate the silence.
In his most recent production, Bhopal, Rahul Varma clearly articulates baby Zarina’s journey, both the nine months inside the womb and for the 18 days on the outside. The play which is a dramatization of historical events is a story that is based in the characters. With a strong political focus on the health of women and how the race for industrialization affects health especially of those in the third world, this play raises further questions about the perceived value of women in society today. What Varma discovered in his research was that the plant’s lax maintenance, forced mothers in the area to inhale poisonous gases and thus acquiring diseases so harmful that their unborn children were also affected by disease and deformity.

“This is a fundamental violation of the dignity of people…it is corporate inhumanity designed in the western world and shipped to a poor country like India and then legitimized in the development and progress of the state,” says Varma.
The denial of a woman’s right to a healthy baby and a child’s right to be born healthy lead him to explore the perception that we as a society don’t care about the consequences of our actions, particularly when it comes to the social and health conditions of women.
“This is a fundamental violation of the dignity of people…it is corporate inhumanity designed in the western world and shipped to a poor country like India and then legitimized in the development and progress of the state”

As a self proclaimed feminist, Rahul Varma was always drawn to social causes. Part of the experience of a new immigrant becomes the issue of identity. Upon arrival in Canada at the age of 25, he says he didn’t want to define his identity by food, clothing and traditions. Instead Rahul wanted to explore the fundamental issues that define people of a country, those being the social, organic, real issues. Mainstream media often chooses to represent ethnic cultures from either an exotic point of view or as being totally disempowered, poor and destitute. For Rahul neither are true and instead he chose to highlight the ideology of the people of India and focus on the grass roots as opposed to the flimsiness of the middle and upper classes. While the majority of Indians may not be literate they are educated by the experiences of life, and this education should not be dismissed or overlooked.

“People of India are very hard working, they are their ideological selves. They are going through serious difficulties…their lifestyle is not simply a style but rather an ideology that permits them to live the complexity and contradictions that are always surrounding them,” says Varma. Applying innovation to his artistic talent, Varma uses the stage as a tool to engage a broader audience and raise awareness about the new realities of the ethnic and cultural experience.

Previous productions include Trading Inquiries which illustrates the experiences of women in the textile industry and the critically acclaimed Counter Offence which examines conjugal violence against women. Varma says one of his major cultural shocks upon his arrival in Canada was the degree of violence that existed in ethnic communities. Indian culture is heavily interwoven with the notion that women are devis yet they are not treated that way. He says that while the topic of violence against women was a difficult subject for a man to handle, attention needed to be brought to the issue, which from his perspective is a problem of the male culture. “I am learning that the stage should be gender balanced and [currently] the way our theatre and cultural expressions [exist], they are very male dominated…somewhere this has to begin to change,” says Varma.

As the co-founder of Teesri Duniya Theatre, Rahul Varma offers an innovative and entertaining way to raise awareness and get people thinking through socially and politically relevant theatre. His latest production, Bhopal, has been translated into Hindi and given a year long tour in India and is currently in the process of being translated into French for the 2004 year.

For more information on Teesri Duniya visit www.teesriduniyatheatre.com