Since everything is maya, an illusion of realities that emerge and then vanish, drama is played in the context of the wider world. According to Sri Guru Granth Sahib: ‘This world is an illusion; it dies and it is re-born — it comes and it goes in reincarnation.’^[44] The Sikhs believe that every second is a new creation. The past dies, its memory only constructed, the present is real for a nanosecond and the future hasn’t arrived, it is just conjecture.

The Hindus carry out a special service called Arti. It is worship of the creativity of nature but represented in a plate. Arti is very sacred. The Sikh gurus critiqued this. Arti is the entire world. Everything is in a creative state, dying and reliving. The individual needs to break from the confines of buildings into the broader space that exists around him or her. The sacred space is the wider world, not in a confined theatre or building.

But then, why is the Gurdwara sacred? The Gurdwara is not sacred in the sense of demarcated territory. It is the sovereign territory of Guru Granth Sahib, a text to other people, but which is treated as a human person when it is read. Derrida’s philosophy of the differ/ance may help to explain this phenomenon. The Guru Granth Sahib was written by the Sikh Gurus themselves and is in raags (musical format) and cannot be changed, added to or modified. The text is considered as the spoken word without the lag that Derrida conjectures, without the censor of the human mind, without that corruption that takes place between the hidden and the stated. One of the practices in Gurdwaras is to recite the Guru Granth Sahib without an intervening interpretation. The Gurdwara is the residence of the guru. The Sikhs identify themselves with the Guru Granth Sahib, treating it as a living, speaking and engaging entity. It makes no sense to others, but that is the essence of Indian plurality. It is the creative act of every Sikh treating a text as a living person.

The Sikhs do not see the theatre as a sacred territory where the rules of the wider society can be suspended and offence created. But, brought up with pluralism, they respect the Western institution of the apparent ‘free’ theatre. However, they do not expect this historic western tension played as freedom to colonise their own cultural space. They do not mock it nor humiliate it. Coexistence requires negotiation of mutual respect, not assuming a right to offend the other’s sacred. But when the director of the theatre went beyond the Western cultural sphere and dragged in the created sacred of another to humiliate in the theatre’s safe territory, the theatre forfeited that respect and war was declared. Like the colonist who used indigenous co-opted intermediaries to legitimise their rule, the director justified his act by pointing out Bhatti’s origins in a Sikh family. The Western theatre commands respect from people like the Sikhs as long as it stays within its own boundaries. Once it crosses into the territory of others then it has to respect the rules of the ‘other’, otherwise it can only enforce its respect with the aid of the coercive power of the State to suppress the people whose otherwise benign indifference is provoked into protecting their own. The Sikhs stood outside the theatre for twelve days quietly protesting, puzzled by the transgression of the director and the theatre’s production manager’s refusal to engage in a dialogue. Dialogue is at the heart of Indic civilisation. The theatre production manager refused ‘dialogue’. The manager set up a monologue a few days prior to the play being shown, and then, like the imperialist, decided that the community had to learn ‘freedom of the theatre’. The director’s crusade, like a colonist, to ‘teach’ an ancient civilisation the West’s newly acquired concept of freedom was an absurdity in itself. Like the French who pursued culture evangelisation in East India in the seventeenth century, only to be thrown out, like the missionaries who caused havoc with their soul-saving crusades in ancient civilisations, the manager-director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre was on a mission, little realising the comedy of the producer’s own position. The director’s freedom is that of the adolescent emerging into puberty, full of bravado, threatening without the wisdom of experience. The Sikh has inherited centuries of freedom with the sophistication of critique and drama without crossing the limits of offence.

It is notable that the Sikh representatives who defended the Sikhs’ objections to the play in public statements,^[45] made a clear distinction between the artha and the abhinaya, stating that they had no problems with the substance of the play, but objected to the depiction of the Gurdwara and symbolism of Guru Granth Sahib, both of which are their sacred institutions separate from those of others.^[46] In contrast, almost all articles and comments by leading figures from the arts and media, including the petition by 700 leading luminaries of British arts conflated everything into ‘freedom of speech’^[47] and ‘refusing debate’^[48] or ‘the right to challenge religion’!^[49] Most of the articles and statements attacking Sikhs seemed to lack any rationale or analysis and depend more on histrionics. It is still not clear to Sikhs who this debate was supposed to be with, as the audience was largely white middle class and some British educated Indians who rarely if ever go to Gurdwaras. The community that this debate was supposed to be initiated in was enraged by the disrespect shown to the Guru Granth Sahib and the Gurudwara, the ‘Rasa’ had broken down.

In context, Behzti brought two civilisations into contact but in unfortunate circumstances. From the perspective of Indic civilisation, the West’s much protected and prided freedom of expression extending to freedom to offend^[50] in arts and theatre^[51] is but an old conflict being played between those in power and those without power that started in the Roman amphitheatre with its captured audience in a walled confine. The Romans ridiculed the weak in the bloody games in their amphitheatre. After them, the Church saw its right to be free to offend human reason from the theatre of the pulpit. In the twentieth century, human reason assumes a new born right to offend religious doctrine from the theatre of arts. This has no relevance in Indic civilisation which is based on the principle, ‘believe and let believe’. Freedom of conscience and expression is a fundamental aspect of the non-dualist Indic civilisation. It allows critique and dialogue but stops at gratuitous offence to preserve and nurture its essential plurality. The wider play in Behzti was the interaction between two different civilisations with different historical evolution of ideas and political dynamics of freedoms, and with different philosophical developments. One which sees the right to offend as its sacred duty, while the other which, in the words of Yarrow, ‘needs to be recognised...for the subtlety and power of its grasp of the nature and operation of individual and communal effects as embedded in its performance tradition and in Natyasastra’.^[52]