“I will not adopt the lioness on a cheesegrater.”
This one quote from Aristophanes has been causing much amusement in classrooms across the world for a while now. Students will be students. The only time I taught Lysistrata, classical Greek playwright Aristophanes’s anti-war comedy, there was no doubt in my mind that the tables were turned, and I had no power — only my students did — over the above quote. I, therefore, empathise with Atul Kumar, the director of Ambaa, a new theatrical adaptation of the Greek comedy.
Lysistrata was first performed in 411 BCE during the Peloponnesian War, at that time an equally farcical, devastating, and inconclusive war as the ones we are currently witnessing in different parts of the world. The central conceit of the play may appear fantastical to many: to counter the irrational persistence of war, a cross-border coalition of women withholds sex to force men to negotiate peace. Ambaa, the Hindi (Bundelkhandi) adaptation, could not have been timed better. Our headlines are all about war and sex (abuse) these days.
It is easy for a play like Lysistrata, and its adaptations, to be derailed by the undue focus on the sex side of the narrative and performance. And for an adaptation that uses a language with a repertoire of cusswords whose currency works nationwide, this risk increases manifold. Most non-Hindi speakers, even Hindi-haters in India, are well versed in the anatomically inspired expletives. Watching Ambaa in Delhi, a city infamous for its penchant for invoking mothers and sisters, was a mother of an experience.
Reeling under the domino effect of the Iran-Israel-US war, we do not even need daily reports from the battlegrounds across West Asia to know that war disrupts and reshapes everyday life. Watching a play about war and peace and sex, therefore, is nothing short of a luxury. The experience is poignant because of its precarity. A month of energy crisis, and we’d go back to the days of subsistence. We practised it during the COVID pandemic. German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s oft-quoted lines, “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times”, may provide a moment of self-congratulatory courage and resilience. But we have also seen the toothlessness of this courage when starvation strikes.
Lysistrata and Ambaa are about courage and helplessness. They are about desperate measures — some that can jeopardise the continuation of the human race. The women are fed up. Rather than bearing sons and seeing them getting killed in endless wars, why not put an end to the business of babymaking to begin with? While a literal sex strike may seem improbable in modern geopolitical contexts, the broader strategy of leveraging social and personal relationships to influence political outcomes has clear analogues. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, led by Leymah Gbowee, famously employed a form of sex strike alongside nonviolent demonstrations to pressure warring factions during the Liberian Civil War. Gbowee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her leadership in this movement.
Some artefacts never lose relevance because of the incorrigibility of human failings. Same mistakes, different times. Lysistrata’s anti-war core remains intact. Modern feminist readings of the play tend to move beyond the notion that women’s power resides primarily in their sexuality, instead emphasising political agency, intersectionality, and structural critique. This evolution reflects changing understandings of gender and power, while also demonstrating the adaptability of Aristophanes’ work to new intellectual frameworks.
Protesting the Iraq war in 2003, the Lysistrata Project brought together thousands of artists across 59 countries to stage readings and performances of Lysistrata as a coordinated act of protest on March 3. Perhaps Ambaa, shortlisted for this year’s Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards, is a nudge to that moment. As an anti-war comedy centred on women’s collective resistance, the play already challenges conventional power structures. When audiences appropriate a line, phrase, or a gesture for their own amusement, they participate — however playfully — in this spirit of subversion.
Maybe that’s all one can do before going to a dinner where everyone is a West Asia expert and “the situation in Iran” can be discussed ad infinitum.
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal
