It happened after I’d been to Bangladesh.
That’s how I came to write “Light In The Village”; and that’s how it somehow found its way to Karachi (where I saw it two years ago) after finding its way to Manila.
Tanghalang Ateneo first produced it there, translated into Tagalog under the title “Ningning Sa Salangan”in 1999; and the same company are staging a new production right now.
And it opens tonight…
I’d gone to Dhaka with the Traverse Theatre Company, who were doing a British Council Tour of the Middle and Far East with my GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
The last stop was the auditorium of Dhaka’s National Museum on the 14th and 17th December 1989
The poverty I saw struck me so much more forcefully because not long before I've been in Long Beach, California.
So I'd gone from the richest country in the world to the poorest within the space of a few weeks.
When I was still a child I’d seen the first photos of Earth from space…
…Photos that revealed how the divisions between country and culture and race were illusory.
Pictures that showed we all belong to one humanity on one earth and that we all belong together.
And now I’d felt and seen that. Felt it in my own body; seen it with my own eyes.
The people I've met in California were all very much out of touch with nature.
They lived in a part of the world that was only fit for human habitation because water was piped there from the Colorado river hundreds of miles away.
The people I met in Bangladesh were at the mercy of the natural world.
The rivers flowing through their city had become prone to flooding.
The alluvial mud on which their city was built was subsiding.
Climate change was making the typhoons that struck them every year more and more powerful and destructive.
What was true then is even more terribly true now.
The obscene poverty in one part of the world is the product of the obscene wealth in another.
We all live in one world, one interconnected world, one world divided by appalling economic injustice and united by catastrophic climate change.
Back then in 1989 I saw it all so clearly.
All the more clearly because that was the year of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
A collapse that everyone said marked the defeat of Communism.
But it seemed to me that the wall held up Capitalism, too. That Capitalism was doomed to collapse, and that we are living through the painful and protracted birth of a new world order.
I wanted to write about this.
I'd been writing about the decline of my country, the decline of the United Kingdom, but in global terms the fate of my little country didn't seem important anymore.
I wanted to write about our interconnected world.
So the following year I travelled to India, and spent some time in a village in Bengal.
I learnt something about the life of the people living there, I wanted to try to write about it.
That's how I came to write "Light In The Village" which opened in the Traverse Theatre in August 1991.
It was the story of a poor couple who had been unjustly deprived of a piece of land. Of how they tried to cultivate it anyway, and paid a terrible price.
The play didn't do very well in this country, but found its way to other places, including Manila.
I don't quite know how this happened, but somehow it reached Doctor Ricardo Abad, an inspiring and charismatic lecturer and theatre maker in Manila’s Ateneo University.
He had it translated into Tagalog, the Filipino language, and produced in 1999.
I was proud and excited that a play that had already been forgotten in my own country should be being staged in the Philippines, but couldn’t see any way of getting to see it.
And I was proud and excited to hear that it was being produced right now, but again couldn’t see how I could go.
And then Sabrina Basilio, the production’s dramaturg, wrote to ask me to write a note for the programme; and she sent me Dr Abad’s notes for the first production.
And when I read them, I knew I had to go.
Reading this, I expect you’ll understand why:
The Light of Fr. Thomas
Ricardo G. Abad
Director’s Notes for the 1999 staging of ‘Ningning sa Silangan’
Fr. Achanikal Thomas, S.J. was a forty-something Indian Jesuit priest when he entered the Ateneo as a graduate student in sociology. He was in two of my courses, and impressed me with his passionate concern for social inequality and the situation of the poor.
Only years later did I find out why he was much concerned. Fr. Thomas, I learned, had for years been an active member of a religious group that helped to equip poor villagers in India with skills to survive in a world of legal contracts and global markets. But the work also involved them in matters beyond arithmetic and the alphabet. In one celebrated case, Fr. Thomas and his team sued members of an affluent family for stealing a poor villager's land. Against many odds, the court ruled in favor of the poor villager and sentenced the affluent to jail. The legal victory won for Fr. Thomas the affection of many villagers, several of whom sought him for similar forms of assistance.
Father Thomas chose me as his thesis adviser, and found some funds for me to visit India and join him for field work. He wanted to assess the impact of the literacy program and find out how to make the program more effective in serving poor villagers. On October 22, three weeks before my scheduled departure, he sent me a message via e-mail. An excerpt read;
Your coming this side by the third week of November may be better as it would give you a little more time. It would be winter here and a bit cold. It is the beginning and it won't be thạt bad. There is no straight flight to Calcutta; you would have to change flights either at Hong Kong, Singapore or at Kuala Lumpur, depending on the airline you fly.
From CALCUTTA you can get a domestic flight (INDIAN AIRLINES) TO RANCHI, which is a 100km from HAZARIBAGH; RANCHI is our closest domestic airport. If you need any other detail, kindly let me know.
If you would like to come early, it is ok with me. Kindly let me know how long you will be able to stay so that I can arrange your program. We can do it after you come also. I shall look forward to hearing / seeing you sometime soon.
This was the last I heard of Fr. Thomas. A week after the receipt of this e-mail, Fr. Robert Rivera, S.J., another Jesuit sociologist, wrote to say that Fr. Thomas had died, a victim of a brutal murder. "So far," Fr. Rivera added, "the details regarding Fr. Thomas' death have been quite sparse … we have only been able to obtain the address of his parents so far, just in case you may wish to write." The details came a week after.
In the course of his field work, Fr. Thomas visited the village where he once won a land case against a wealthy family. During that visit, he learned that the men sentenced to jail for the case had been freed. What Fr. Thomas did not know, or perhaps refused to know, was that these men plotted vengeance against him.
One day, in the company of some villagers, Fr. Thomas was nabbed by unidentified thugs. He was tied, gagged, blindfolded and sent to an undisclosed place. He was not heard from for days. His Jesuit brothers, with the help of local authorities and community members, began a search but came out empty-handed. Within the same week, a villager found Fr. Thomas' decapitated head on the shore of a beach. The rest of his body was nowhere around, and as far as I can recall, never found. The Jesuits pressed for an investigation, and as they did, also prepared a funeral for Fr. Thomas.
The funeral was one of the biggest in town. Thousands came to mourn. Many wept. Their grief was an outpouring of affection for a well-loved priest and a show of outrage against the stupidity of violence.
I still hadn't gotten over Fr. Thomas' death when I read [Jo] Clifford's Light in the Village. I was stunned and moved. The play was set in an Indian village and many of the issues it dealt with, - land, violence, ignorance, exploitation, religion, poverty, power, patriarchy, and change - were very much part of Fr. Thomas' concerns. They were as well the concerns of the Philippines and the Third World, the stuff of my classes in sociology and anthropology. I wanted to stage it, and eventually found it to be a fitting start for Tanghalang Ateneo's 21st Season, the Season of Light.
In Merchant of Venice, Portia returns home after a hectic day in court and notices a candle glowing in the dark. "How far that little candle throws in its beams!" She observes, "So shines a good deed in a naughty world."
The Season of Light honors those good deeds, the deeds of people like Fr. Thomas, the little candles of deeds - by Tagailog and Inangbayan, Sita and Muntu, Shylock and Stockmann - that are also misunderstood and misconstrued, shunned, ignored or belittled. Yet these are the beams of light that will blind the forces of oppression, spark change, and enlighten us. These are also the deeds of light that, in St. John's words, "shineth in darkness" even though "the darkness comprehended it not."
I wish to thank [Jo] Clifford who enthusiastically granted us the permission to have [her] play staged and Jerry Respeto who just as enthusiastically translated the play in Filipino. I also wish to thank the alumni cast of actors - Gabe Mercado, Pauline Suaco, Ron Capinding, Devi Igancio-Paez and Paul Gongora - who made time from their hectic schedules to join the first all-alumni cast we've ever assembled for a TA play. Allan Forte and his team also deserve thanks for rekindling the light of the touring The Kahapon Ngayon at Bukas Seditious Love Musical so that I could devote time for Ningning sa Silangan and Merchant of Venice.
In his tribute to a fellow Jesuit, Fr. Joaquin Bernas, S.J., writing for Today, said that Fr. Thomas was well-known in his religious community as a man of much humor. I did not see that side of Fr. Thomas. I would have, I guess, if I had gone to India in November 1997. Ningning sa Silangan is my vicarious route to Fr. Thomas' India, and it is to him that I dedicate this work. I directed it so he can laugh and cry and cheer and rage.
May 1999