About the Play
In Search of Dariya Sagar is a meditation on memory, loss, exile and the elusive idea of home. At a time, when the world is witnessing unprecedented migration, the biggest moral conundrum that confronts the world is that of giving safe refuge to these ‘outsiders’. To give them a home, away from home. But can you ever re-create home? Can home be ever retrieved? Does it become more elusive as time passes and hence more vivid? Does home mean different things to different generations? These are the questions at the heart of this narrative, an attempt to turn the pages of history to understand the scars it has left in the present. And like most narratives, this one too is a journey of self-discovery, where the self is inextricably bound to the larger Self of the community and where redemption lies perhaps in recognizing the same.
Synopsis of the Play
Jatin is a tour guide at the Gateway of India. He has just one problem. He is a Sindhi. Something he hasn't come to terms with all his life and so leads an isolated existence in a dingy room at Colaba Causeway, away from his privileged family house. Till a strange vision, almost an epiphany of sorts, descends on him at the very shores of the Gateway of India while giving a tour, a destination, where most Sindhis landed from Karachi in ships, leaving their hearths and homes behind and carrying dreams of a better future with them. Tina is a teacher in an international school. She teaches Language and Literature to her students with a deep social conscience. She moans the loss of her language and identity and her access to the lost world. Jatin and Tina know each other since they were kids. They studied in the same college too. But haven’t ever been able to sustain a conversation beyond a point. Their journeys are in the opposite direction, one wanting to retrieve her heritage and language, while the other wanting to disavow it. Till a certain mystery behind Jatin’s grandmother’s property, which she left behind to be decoded, brings them together. And there begins a fresh voyage into the past, where more secrets, memories, unlikely stories are discovered, giving some perspective on the fractured present and rottenness which Jatin feels lies at the heart of the ‘deterritorialized’ community.
About the Blind and The Elephant Theatre Group
Having worked in theatre for the past several years, Gerish Khemani, founded his own theatre group,The Blind and the Elephant, in 2015, which is dedicated to creating original work based on solid research, searching for forms to tell stories that emerge from their cultural context and that continue to shape us, and in raising fundamental questions about the self and its relation to community in this increasingly alienated world of ours. An extensively physical approach to creating work, using the collective imagination in the room and a constant playfulness to develop a strong ensemble and crafting a layered visual universe lie at the core of our work.