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As
an intern of the Society for Social Regeneration & Equity (SSRE), Rajat Prajapati,
a final year student of BTech+MBA dual degree programme, staged a play set in
the backdrop of the Holocaust, written and directed by him, at his institution,
Gautam Buddha University, on 15th January, 2015, under the auspices
of the SSRE’s Holocaust Education Project. Rajat Prajapati, who played a Nazi
commander, says that he was inspired to write the play by the the Executive
Director of the Youth Outreach Programme of the SSRE, Dr Navras Jaat Aafreedi,
a committed Holocaust educator. What makes this play so significant is the fact
that it is perhaps the only play on the Holocaust in Hindi and extremely
relevant to India given the absence of Holocaust education in the country
despite the frequent occurrence of mass violence there. The paradox of the
popularity of Hitler in India in spite of the absence of anti-Semitism there,
except in certain sections of its Muslim minority, makes the play even more
significant.
The play is the story
of the horrors of the Holocaust as witnessed by one of the soldiers of the
Indian legion of Hitler, which had been raised by the Indian nationalist leader
Subash Chandra Bose by recruiting soldiers from the Prisoner-of-War camps in
Germany which, at that time, were home to tens of thousands of Indian soldiers
of the British Indian army captured by Rommel in North Africa. Bose intended to
use this army to liberate India from the British rule.
In addition to this
Indian element in the story, the Roma also figure in the play. The Roma are a
people of Indian origin, resident in Europe for the last six hundred years.
Seventy per cent of their population was eliminated during the Holocaust along with six million Jews (2/3rd of the European Jewish population and 1/3rd of the world Jewish population). The
protagonist, the Indian PoW, Gurudas Singh, played by a graduate student,
Aakash, finds refuge among them after his escape from prison, but is later
mistaken for a Roma and sent to a concentration camp along with the Roma and
Jews.
It is commendable that
students succeeded in staging this play despite all odds. Driven by a strong
desire to raise awareness of the Holocaust and counter the popularity Hitler
has come to enjoy in India because of yearning for a strong leadership, the
students themselves took care of all the expenses of costumes and props.
The play was
accompanied by a poster exhibition on the Holocaust. The SSRE will be helping
the students stage this play at institutions of higher education across India,
for it believes that Holocaust education is required in India more than any
other education because of the frequent occurrence of mass violence there. It
would be easier for Indians to retain their objectivity while studying the
Holocaust and draw lessons from it as to what leads to genocide and how it can
be prevented, than any other episode of mass violence that took place in India,
because Holocaust was a genocide that neither involved any section of Indian
society nor any of the two major religious communities of India, viz., Hindus
and Muslims. Considering the above mentioned factor and the fact that no other
genocide can match the scale and magnitude of the Holocaust, it serves as an
ideal case for the study of genocides and their prevention.
Photos: Aditya Saxena, Gautam Buddha University
