Gursharan Singh

Gursharan Singh (1929 to 2011), known as Bhaji, was the leading figure of Punjabi people's theatre and a lifelong man of the Left. He took plays out of the auditorium to village squares, platforms and street corners, wrote close to 200 of them, and was jailed under the Emergency for it.

Wikipedia gives his birth as 16 September 1929 at Multan and his death as 27 September 2011 at Chandigarh. The playwright Atamjit writes that he was the son of a well-known doctor in pre-Partition Punjab, held a master's degree in chemistry and from 1961 worked for twenty years as a cement technologist in the Punjab government's canal and irrigation department; The Daily Post calls him an engineer at the Bhakra project at Nangal. His group was the Amritsar Natak Kala Kendra. Punjabi television audiences also knew him as Bhai Manna Singh, a part he played in a Doordarshan serial.

Key moments

• He developed what is called thada theatre, plays staged on a platform wherever one could be found, from rural Punjab to Delhi. His plays include Kiv Koode Tuttey Paal, Band Kamre, Hit List (staged in front of Sri Harmandir Sahib) and Dhamak Nagare Dee, a retelling of the Dulla Bhatti legend.
• September 1976: jailed in the Emergency, after Band Kamre challenged the suppression of free expression (The Daily Post). He lost his government post. Atamjit adds that he had attacked Chief Minister Giani Zail Singh from the stage, though Zail Singh had earlier praised his work.
• During the years of the Punjab crisis he kept staging plays in villages. Gurpreet Singh, writing in the Georgia Straight, says he criticised Sikh fundamentalism, and Atamjit says he spoke against Khalistani "militancy" to village and town audiences. One writer reports that Gurcharan Singh Tohra ordered one of his plays stopped as "anti-Sikh" and called the organisers Russian agents.
• 2004: Kalidasa Samman. 27 September 2011: he died, on the eve of Bhagat Singh's birth anniversary, whom he admired and staged plays about nearly every year.

What he is remembered for. For theatre that went to the village rather than the seminar hall, and for refusing both state censorship and what these writers call fundamentalism. His death date is kept as Revolutionary Theatre Day, and at his 94th birth anniversary in 2023 speakers called for a campaign to preserve his family home in Amritsar as a memorial.