Following a well-received premiere at Leicester Curve last month, Purva Naresh’s Pink Sari Revolution heads to Coventry next week, bringing the story of of Indian women’s rights activist Sampat Pal vividly to life on stage.

The play marks the second co-production between the Belgrade and Leicester Curve to be directed by Suba Das, whose 2016 show Wipers won an Asian Media Award for Best Stage Production. We spoke to Das to find out more about his latest project, and the formidable real-life woman who inspired it.

“About two and a half years ago, I was at a friend’s wedding when I found myself chatting to another guest about my work at Curve, and in particular my aim of identifying stories that help us to bring new audiences into the building. I said that I was interested in stories that on some level feel untold or unheard, and they suggested a book called Pink Sari Revolution by Amana Fontanella Khan.

“As they said to me at the time, I think there is an awareness here of the horrific reality faced by women in India, but people don’t necessarily know that there is also a very powerful current of resistance by women who are empowering themselves. If feels like a lot of the narrative that is received in the UK about Indian women and British Asian women is one of victimhood and lack of agency, so straight away I found it really exciting that this story could exist about women who are saying no.”

Drawing on Fontanella Khan’s experiences of living among the members of guerilla women’s rights group, the “Gulabi Gang”, the book follows the journey of its founder, Sampat Pal, from humble origins to one of the world’s most prominent and influential campaigners. There is, Das laughs, enough material in the book to furnish five plays, so he opted to single out a two-week window, during which Pal took up the case of Sheelu Nishad: a low caste woman, held as captive in a politician’s house where she was raped, only to be threatened with further imprisonment by the state when she escaped.

Born to a shepherding family in India’s impoverished Uttar Pradesh district, the young Sampat Pal taught herself to read and write as a child, before being married off at the age of 12. By the time she hit 20, she had five children already, but she was never someone destined to play the passive wife for long.

It was as a young woman that Pal got her first taste of vigilante-style activism, showing herself quite literally prepared to fight for her cause. The story goes that one day she was walking through her village, when she saw a man beating his wife and begged him to stop. He refused; so she returned the following day with a group of women armed with sticks, who proceeded to give him a taste of his own medicine. Thus the core of the Gulabi Gang was formed. Pal’s quick resort to violence might be surprising, and perhaps not particularly laudable, but it’s precisely these tensions that Das is most interested in exploring.

“As part of our research for the show, I went out to meet with and live with the gang and Sampat herself for a while, and during that time I spoke with Sheelu and some of the other key characters in our story. What was really interesting is that Sampat and Sheelu are not friends now – in fact, Sheelu feels very angry with Sampat. As we explored the case further, there is a real sense that the way Sampat intervened was perhaps not entirely what the girl wanted, and there’s an interesting question around her motives and agenda. Sampat was ambitious and eager to be part of a big political situation. Status and power are incredibly important to her, and this was a case that offered her both of those things, so she went hell for leather for it.

“What I hope that we’re creating is a really complex portrayal of Sampat, because she is a very divisive figure. For me, she’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, and I do want audiences to experience the show and think, ‘Wow, this woman has already done more than most of us will ever do in our lifetimes.’ But it’s not a kind of saintly portrayal. It’s about trying to look at what it means to be such an incredible person. What are the sacrifices and compromises you make to get there?”

To write the play, he enlisted the help of Purva Naresh, herself an Indian activist as well as a playwright. What she’s written is in many ways a world away from how the Gulabi Gang’s real-life members speak. For one thing, it isn’t in their language, and for another, Pal herself is “like a human whirlwind” - someone who tends to arrive, shout some slogans, and then move onto the next job. But it’s hoped that Naresh’s more reflective and poetic script will get to the heart of who the characters are and what the movement is all about.

“It was really important to me to find an Indian female playwright to take this adaptation on, because I felt like there was a real risk of commenting on these women’s experiences instead of inhabiting them in their complexity. I had first heard of Purva through a project at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where six Indian playwrights were brought over to the UK for a short season of new plays. Her play, OK, Tata, Bye Bye was about prostitution in rural India and what it means for communities She’s also won a United Nations award for her work on gender in India, so choosing her felt like a bit of a no-brainer.”

For all its hard-hitting subject matter, however, Das is quick to stress that there are no depictions of actual violence, nudity or other explicit content in the play. He’s not particularly interested in shocking viewers by visually hammering a point home – in fact, there’s almost a sense he feels that this would undermine the nuance and complexity he’s striving for. Instead, visual metaphors are used to help create a sense of what’s happening, such as a sequence inspired by the Gudiya Festival, which takes place every year in the region where the gang are based.

“Gudiya means ‘doll’, and on this day, girls make little female dolls for their brothers, who then take the dolls outside and smash them to smithereens with sticks. It’s been celebrated for over 100 years, so some of the cultural origin has been lost in the sands of time, but when Purva and I heard about it, it seemed like quite an extreme example of how violence towards women is normalised. So it’s a challenge to watch, but it’s not gratuitous.

“And when you think about it, it’s just part of a wider cultural phenomenon that exists everywhere. I mean, how many young boys in the UK play games like Grand Theft Auto where you’re encouraged to pick up prostitutes and then run them over? It’s so easy with a story like this to go, ‘Oh, how awful that this happens in India. Thank God we’re not there.’ But let’s not imagine that we don’t live in a society that in a million and one ways tacitly endorses violence against women on a daily basis. I mean isn’t it weird how we say to girls, ‘Here’s a My Little Pony,’ and then to boys, ‘Here’s a gun, off you go and play’?”

This is just one of several stylised scenes that has involved working closely with acclaimed choreographer Aakash Odedra, who is acting as movement director for the shows. But in addition to his contributions, there’s also an innate theatricality to the way the Gulabi Gang work which made them an attractive subject to a director. Like Das, much of Sampat Pal’s task has been to find a way of presenting her message in an attention-grabbing and easily digestible form.

“One of the first things I thought about when I heard about the book was how spectacular 20,000 women in neon pink saris would look on a stage. Sadly, my cast isn’t 20,000 strong, but I think we’ve gone a fair way towards making a very big, epic pink statement with the production,” he laughs. “It did feel very visual and dynamic, and at one point early in the process we thought it might be a kind of all-singing, all-dancing spectacular. But in the end it’s become very stripped down. There are some very expressionistic episodes, and a lot of very beautiful “stage pictures” that are quite surreal at times, but it’s also quite sparse.”

Like Wipers, Das hopes that Pink Sari Revolution will be a play that speaks to everyone and not just women or the sizeable Indian and South Asian populations of both Coventry and Leicester. Nevertheless, the two cities’ similar multicultural makeup is a major part of what makes them feel like natural partners.

“It’s been absolutely extraordinary bringing work to the Belgrade over the past couple of years. Winning the Asian Media Award last year for Wipers which was such an honour because it’s a massive, international level award at a really glittering ceremony. It was really thrilling to know that the Asian community in this country at the highest level felt so excited that a story like Wipers had been told. 

“I think what we’ve been really proud of as organisations is telling stories that resonate with both of our communities and maximising our potential to share them with as many people as possible. So we’re already eagerly discussing what might come next, because it feels like we’ve started a really exciting journey together.”

Pink Sari Revolution is at the Belgrade Theatre 11-21 October.