Image Source: TRIBUNE

For the first time, a local playwright’s play has been selected at the Shri Ram Centre, New Delhi, and will be released on March 7. He is associated with a Jammu-based theatre.

The play, ‘Vanidafan’, written by Jammu playwright Vikram Sharma, is being produced by Delhi-based group ‘Robroo’. The tickets for the play are available on BookMyShow.

The play is based on a ghastly ritual in practice among some tribal groups on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where girls are exchanged in forced marriage to different communities over land feuds. Vani is a custom in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where girls, often minors, are given in a marriage or servitude to an aggrieved family as compensation to end disputes, often murder. Vani is a Pashto word derived from ‘vanay’, which means blood. It is also known as ‘sak’ and ‘sangchatti’ in different regional languages of Pakistan.

In the play, the main character, a girl named Vaziya, makes a plan to end the ghastly ritual and offers herself as vani to the head of the tribal lord. She takes the close aide of the tribal lord, a eunuch, into confidence and hatches the conspiracy to end the custom of vani in the tribe.