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About the play

Dhooni Di Agg is a full-length Punjabi play by Balwant Gargi, first published in 1977. It is one of three major plays Gargi wrote in the last phase of his career, after he returned to India from teaching theatre in the United States: the other two were Sultan Razia, a historical play, and Saukan, a rural one. Of the three, Dhooni Di Agg is the urban play, and the darkest. Gargi's early work, from Loha Kutt in 1944 to Kanak Di Balli in 1968, had taken up the peasant struggle and the life of the Punjab village. This play turns inward, to what happens behind closed doors in a city house.

The play's subject is what polite life hides. In a profile published in Sangeet Natak, the critic Bindu Batra described Gargi's late plays as a study of violence, sexual violence, repression, incest and jealousy, an attempt to discover what is happening in the dark courtyards of the villages and behind the drawing-room platitudes of city life. Dhooni Di Agg is the city half of that discovery.

The fire in the title

A dhuni is the fire an ascetic keeps burning at his seat, a small hearth that is never allowed to go out. Gargi takes that image and sets it inside a household. The fire in the title is both literal and figurative: a hearth that smoulders, and the passions that smoulder with it. The title has been rendered in English as Fire in the Furnace, and the Sangeet Natak profile calls it The Dark Lantern, a fair description of a play that looks for light in dark rooms.

Fire suits Gargi's purpose because it does two things at once. It warms a house and it destroys one. The play draws its power from that double meaning: the same heat that holds a family together is the heat that can burn it down.

Desire, repression and violence

By the 1970s Gargi had moved away from the social themes of his early plays. He had grown impatient with plays that carried a message, and he said so plainly: the habit of hurling political and social ideologies at the people had produced a theatre full of melodrama and sentiment. His late plays instead explore the human being at what he called a more elemental level, and Dhooni Di Agg is the clearest example.

The forces in the play are the oldest ones: desire that cannot be spoken, jealousy between people who live under one roof, and the violence that follows when repression fails. Gargi had long been drawn to the theatre of cruelty of Antonin Artaud, and to the poetic drama of Federico Garcia Lorca. In this play those influences come to the front. Nothing is explained away as a social problem. The audience is left with the heat itself.

Why is Dhooni Di Agg compared to Lorca?

Critics who write about Gargi often reach for Lorca, and Dhooni Di Agg is the play that earns the comparison most. Gargi's Kanak Di Balli had already been likened to Lorca's Blood Wedding, and Dhooni Di Agg, with its city household and its hidden passions, reminded critics of Yerma, Lorca's play of a woman whose longing is thwarted until it turns destructive. The comparison is not about plot. It is about method: both playwrights take ordinary domestic life and show the mythic forces underneath it, desire and death, working in plain rooms.

Gargi himself had learned from Lorca as well as from Brecht and Artaud. He spent months at the Berliner Ensemble watching Brecht's productions, and he drew on Sanskrit classics as freely as on European modernism. The result in Dhooni Di Agg is a Punjabi play that speaks a local language and thinks in universal images: a hearth, a house, a family, and a fire that will not go out.

ਲੇਖਕ

Balwant Gargi (1916 to 2003) was born at Sehna in Barnala district and became the pioneer of modern Punjabi playwriting. His first play, Loha Kutt, appeared in 1944, and his plays were translated into twelve languages and performed around the world, in Moscow, London, New Delhi and the United States. He founded the Department of Indian Theatre at Panjab University, Chandigarh, and his students included Anupam Kher and Kiron Kher. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962 for his book Rang Manch, and later the Padma Shri and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award.

Gargi wrote Dhooni Di Agg after a long wandering life: study in Lahore, travel through Europe, years teaching in Seattle, and then a return to India in 1967 with the resolve to write in India and let India judge his work. He was fifty when he came back, and the plays that followed are the work of a man who had stopped trying to reform his audience and started trying to see them clearly. He also worried, in these years, that Punjabi had no stage diction for city life, that the language was given to pastoral humour and not to a serious theatre of ideas. Dhooni Di Agg, an urban play written in Punjabi, is his answer to his own doubt.

Reception and legacy

Dhooni Di Agg has not had the stage life of Loha Kutt or Kanak Di Balli, and it is rarely the first Gargi play a reader meets. Its place is different: it is the play critics point to when they describe how far Gargi travelled from the village realism of his youth to the mythic, inward theatre of his last years. The Sangeet Natak profile that grouped it with Sultan Razia and Saukan treated the three as a turning point, the moment Gargi stopped writing plays with a message and started writing plays about the human being at an elemental level.

For readers coming to Gargi now, the play is a good second step after Kanak Di Balli: less famous, but sharper in temper, and the clearest window onto the playwright Gargi became in his sixties.