BackThe story of a kidnapping
Hans Christian Ostro, who was abducted and beheaded in Kashmir in 1995, is the subject of a new play
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In mid-1995, actor Shubhrajyoti Barat was accosted by a lively and enigmatic visitor at the green room at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre, after a performance of Baat Laat Ki Halaat Ki, an Indian adaptation of Dario Fo’s satirical play Trumpets And Raspberries—a macabre farce in which the head honcho of a corporation is left disfigured by an aborted kidnap attempt, and later has his face reconstructed as that of an employee whose jacket he had borrowed.
The visitor was Hans Christian Ostro, a 27-year-old Norwegian tourist who had reached the fag end of an India tour of several months (beginning with a stint learning Kathakali in Kerala in January that year) and was looking to crown his subcontinental adventure with a sojourn in Kashmir. Although Ostro had come backstage only to briefly greet the team, Barat and he struck up an animated conversation that extended to an hour. For a 23-year-old theatre actor who knew little beyond the confines of his repertory company, the encounter was certainly tinged with fond memories. Ostro talked of European theatre, and his own grand plans to mount an Indian production in Oslo.
Only days later, in July, Barat was left aghast by newspaper reports of the abduction of five international tourists in Kashmir by a militant organization, Al Faran (a sixth, American John Childs, had managed to escape). Ostro was part of the ill-fated group, and in August that year, he was beheaded. His body was found in a roadside canal near Pahalgam. The other tourists were never heard of again. “It was shocking, to say the least. All I could think about was how it was such a tremendous waste. Hans had so much potential," remembers Barat. The photograph of his decapitated head, placed back upon his body, hit front pages in India and abroad.
In 2011, when Barat was looking to make his debut as a stage director, he kept going back to the episode that had remained unresolved in his mind, and perhaps lent itself to a cathartic retelling on stage, although he was wary of reconstructing (and thereby sensationalizing) Ostro’s final journey.
In 2012, journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark released The Meadow, Kashmir 1995— Where The Terror Began, a book that exhaustively detailed the events leading up to the kidnapping and the international furore it sparked off. It was the result of years of painstaking research that involved talking to hundreds of people—members of the police force and the army, militants, renegades, Kashmiri locals, the friends and relatives of abductees, negotiators and diplomats—across several countries.
What emerged strikingly from accounts in the book (and perhaps cemented Barat’s resolve to go ahead with his project) was the doomed Ostro’s fierce defiance even in the face of the most hellish upheaval. A precursor to The Meadow was a website maintained by the book’s authors, which put together an archive of secret letters penned by Ostro—on scraps of paper, loose bark, anything he could get hold of—while being herded around in remote parts of the Valley. Some of these messages were pleas for help, others were poems and philosophical musings. Collectively, they spoke of a resilience that was reckless, perhaps, but also a testament to his incandescent spirit—borne out in eyewitness accounts of his constant grappling with his abductors.
After the book was launched, there was certainly media coverage (including several glowing reviews) of the kind literary works routinely attract, but despite its startling contention that it was Kashmiri renegades affiliated with Indian security forces (“the insidious Indian hand") who had “executed" the other abducted tourists after acquiring them from Al-Faran, it did not become a cause célèbre with the powers-that-be. Perhaps the opening of a 20-year-old can of worms wasn’t such a hot potato.
Like Tikoo, there are other talking heads in the play drawn from the intricate tapestry of secrecy and deception laid out by Levy and Scott-Clark. However, Hussain has crafted fictional stand-ins—for instance, a girl at the village where the tourists were incarcerated describes how Ostro’s frenzied attempts to escape were foiled each time. Although sufficiently fleshed out in the book, the Al-Faran operative who carried out the beheading (and, in effect, the person Ostro spent much many of his last days with) is excised from this narrative.
The footage of a video, uploaded on the website Vimeo, in which Ostro provides a guided tour of the Kathakali ashram in Kerala where he learnt his craft, leads to another character—that of an imagined videographer in thrall of an effusive personality. Avantika Akerkar has been cast as Ostro’s mother, who poignantly reminisces about a son whose life was snuffed out too early—culled from actual exchanges with the play’s creative team. Stringing it all together is the narrator-like presence of a maskhara, the wise clown who is a staple of Kashmiri folk theatre—the Bhand Pather. The clown has traditionally been a farcical creature with an all-knowing demeanour, and in this telling, he is also the doppelgänger for the play’s conspicuously absent protagonist.
The swan in the title is a translation of what Ostro’s first name, Hans, would mean in Hindi. The title also appears to allude to a lyrical chapter in the Bhagavad Gita— the Hamsa Gita or the Song Of The Swan—in which Krishna instructs his disciple, Uddhava, to carry the message of his death to his family and people. In his fleeting (and eerily prescient) encounter with Barat, the production Ostro had talked about so excitedly was based on the Gita.
“It was to open at Oslo’s prestigious Black Box Theatre, and he himself would feature in it in full Kathakali regalia," says Barat. In many ways, it was a communiqué that Barat appears to now have finally delivered.
Song Of The Swan will be staged on 3 May, 6pm, at Experimental Theatre, National Centre For The Performing Arts, Mumbai, as part of the fifth edition of Ananda Hindi Natya Utsav.
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