Category
Theatre
Artists
Directed by Satchit Puranik
Language: Kannada, Dakhini Urdu
Actors
Lakshmi Chandrashekhar
Date
December 2nd 2018.
Ammi Jaan- A play in Kannada, Dakhni and Urdu
Ammi Jaan is adapted from the short story Une Madre by Dario Fo and France Rame.
Synopsis
AMMI JAAN is a monologue of a woman without a name. She can be called Amina or Zahida or anything, for that matter. But she is known to everyone in Tannery Road, Bengaluru as Ammi or Ammi Jaan, a term of endearment.
Ammi Jaan loves to chat, about the neighbourhood gossip, about the half informed knowledge she gains from the obsolete world of her run down cyber café. About the news, both fake and true, that she receives on her modest smart phone.
Ammi Jaan loves to cook and feed, like most mothers, in her neighbourhood. She flaunts the new recipe that she had invented for her only son, Mehmood. As ‘the apple of her eye’ has a weak constitution and suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome since a tender age, she has devised her own ingenious ‘biryani-e-kathal’
She has been packing a tiffin with this biriyani, which she wants to feed her son. Incidentally, he is in jail. He is accused of being a terrorist, or an anti national or an urban naxal, or whatever, the nomenclature of the charge doesn’t really matter. But his crime does. The government had been mapping the dreams of ‘some’ of its citizens, and in his particular dream – his subconscious reveals that he has been thinking of a certain food item, a certain kind of non vegetarian platter, full of stake and kebabs.
Dreaming of a certain forbidden ‘meat’ could mean the end of his freedom. Or the end of his life. Ammi Jaan is telling the audience how dreams work and life ends.