The play, Mera Laung Gwacha, was performed in Park Extension’s William Hingston Community Centre on the 4th of November, 2023. To promote the play, we advertised around the neighborhood as well as regularly on the radio and did a half-hour interview on the local radio station, Humsafar. Our team of mostly amateur actors practiced for months to prepare, and the play was a resounding success.
The actors were phenomenal in their portrayal of complex characters and made our humble stage/set shine. The auditorium was packed with mostly people from a Punjabi background, with several rows of people standing behind the seats as well as a row of folks sitting on the floor in front of the seats.
Before the play, we invited several community groups to speak. They explained, in Hindi/Urdu so that the audience could understand the ways in which they can support immigrants and especially women to access the services they need to take advantage of their rights and get support for whatever difficult circumstances they are passing through, whether it has to do with housing or domestic abuse. It was wonderful to be able to give a chance to community organizations to speak to a large audience.
We are extremely pleased with the final outcome and very grateful to QPIRG Concordia for its support of the project!
The play was about a Canadian family that goes to India to find a bride for their son. The dreams that were painted by the Canadian family to the bride in India turn out to be false. The troubles she faces here are present across many immigrant families. The play along with the workshop allowed the audience to learn how they can find safety through the Canadian legal system, in community centres, women’s shelters, and other spaces. The play was performed in the Punjabi language with subtitles projected on screens to allow others to follow in English and French.
We chose this project because we have witnessed the issue of domestic violence a lot in our Punjabi and wider South Asian communities. In India, because of our work as grassroots social activists, people came to us all the time with their struggles. We found that intimate partner violence was a large-scale issue in society. After coming here in 2019, we have discovered that the situation is similar here. Looking at newspapers over the last few years, we found stories of femicides and infanticides to be disturbingly frequent, with 13 women and 6 children murdered by their partner/parent in 2022 in Quebec. In 2021 a woman from our own community was killed by her partner in Park Extension. Other terrible incidents have taken place in Park Extension in previous years, and we know that women and men who are isolated, having neither language, family, or the resources to look for help, are most affected. In an article from November 2021, the Shield of Athena, a community organization in Park Extension that supports victims of conjugal violence, said that the number one problem in 93 per cent of the cases when accessing help was a lack of information. This is what we intend to help change.
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