Besides being the forebear of a family that is inexorably tied to Hindi cinema, Prithviraj Kapoor (3 November 1906 – 29 May 1972) also put down roots in his first love, theatre. In January 1944, he founded Prithvi Theatre, a travelling theatre company based in Mumbai [then Bombay] which was shut down in 1959 and revived in 1978 by his son Shashi.
The thespian always espoused the arts and wanted theatre to be accessible to the public at large. Ritu Menon in her book Zohra! A Biography in Four Acts details how Prithviraj referred to it as the greatest temple on earth.
Zohra Segal’s perseverance was remarkable, says biographer Ritu Menon
She wrote: In his maiden speech as a Rajya Sabha member, to which he was nominated in 1952, he would say: In that temple, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Sikh and Parsee all get together. Nobody comes and asks who is in the next chair. A Pandit sits with a Mulla. A Communist friend may sit with a socialist friend. A Congressite may sit with those people who are very much communal minded. All sit together. That is a beautiful way of bringing people together and teaching them how to behave. They would laugh together, cry together. It is the biggest temple that could be built for the benefit of the nation.
Prithvi Theatre's maiden production was the 1944 play Shakuntala by poet-playwright Narayan Prasad Betaab. But it was its second dramatic work, Deewar, that caused a great deal of controversy. The subject matter was pertinent, dealing with the Partition of India, a hot-button topic at the time.
Prithviraj was entirely against the idea of dividing the subcontinent and produced four plays which were later referred to as the Partition Quartet. The first, Deewar, which was written by Inder Raj Anand, drew from speeches by Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Menon states that Deewar was ‘symbolised by two brothers who insisted on dividing their ancestral home, egged on by the foreign wife of one brother. A wall would be erected between the two halves. The parallels were unmistakable, and the wall represented the barrier to Hindu-Muslim unity in the country'.
The play was inevitably not allowed to be performed. The British government would not allow it to be staged without an okay from the Muslim League, which was hard to get. The League leaders questioned his involvement in politics when he was just an actor, but Prithviraj persevered.
Zohra! A Biography in Four Acts states that Deewar was both a personal and a political statement for Prithviraj, and he argued passionately for freedom of expression with the British. When permission was finally granted, he remarked, ‘My law studies were finally of some use.’Within days of its opening at the Royal Opera House, however, protests broke out, with some Urdu papers saying the play was anti-Muslim and anti-Jinnah.’
Despite the protests and the occasional benching, the play was one of the troupe’s most successful, having been performed 712 times from 1945 to 1959.
Another play, Pathan, was premiered on 13 April 1947 at the Royal Opera House. It was the second play of the quartet. Written by Lal Chand Bismil, this one championed Hindu-Muslim unity. Two friends, Sher Khan, a Pathan, and a Hindu named Tarachand Diwan are thick friends, like family. When Diwan dies, Khan promises to care for his son Vazir.
But when things go wrong and Vazir is involved in a revenge killing, the tribal chief demands satisfaction with Vazir’s death. The loyal Khan instead gives up his own son Bahadur as a sacrifice.
The book notes, "Zohra [Segal] recalled that ‘every time in the climax of Pathan, when Sher Khan [Prithviraj] handed over his young son to the enemies, honouring the creed of an eye for an eye, there was not a dry eye in the house".
For the next 13 years, Pathan was staged on over 550 occasions, with Shashi declaring it Prithvi Theatre's best production. The other two plays of the quartet are Ghaddar (Traitor) and Ahooti (Sacrifice), which opened in 1948 and 1949 respectively.