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Art in strife
Updated On: 21 July, 2024 08:30 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
MK Raina’s biography documents a life devoted to secular activism and the advancement of theatre and the arts against the backdrop of a turbulent Kashmir
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Kashmiri traditional artists perform Bhand Pather at Dal Lake. Pic/Getty Images
It seemed our work was like that of a darner, who with needle and thread was quietly trying to repair the torn fabric of our Valley,” MK Raina writes in his new biography Before I Forget. The sentence weaves together the two central themes running through the actor, director and activist’s memoir: the separatist militant insurgency in Kashmir that wrecked and divided the land and its people, and a resolute belief in the power of art—to heal the wounds of history.
Raina paints a lively portrait of his early years in the Valley, of heroic cricket matches played on ponds that froze over during the winters, of majnugiri or imagined one-sided romances, and of the early introductions to theatre and music through plays using special effects and mehfils that exposed him to Hindustani classical music and Kashmiri Sufiyana. In the late 1960s, Raina, who calls himself “a product of Indian socialism” having benefited from state support for the arts, joined the National School of Drama. This became a formative period in his life that instilled a spirit of protest, a strong affinity with the city of Delhi—the ‘fulcrum’ of his professional and political life—and a lifelong commitment towards nurturing the theatre movement in the country.
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