From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Charity Platform (Punjabi theatre, 2018)
This is a vernacular Punjabi theatre work. For other South Asian adaptations, see Baul music and Beach Surgery, Kathakali adaptations, and Sikh traditions in adaptation.
The production is not archivally preserved in film or recorded script; knowledge is transmitted orally and through fandom testimony.
A community-created Punjabi theatre work that frames Beach Surgery's narrative of Leif and Katita as a langar cycle—a langar being a communal meal-sharing ritual central to Punjabi Sikh and broader Punjabi culture—wherein surgical care becomes indistinguishable from hospice, feeding, and collective witness. Developed and performed by a neighbourhood ensemble (name and formal affiliation disputed; variously attributed to Chandigarh or Amritsar) over multiple seasons beginning May 2018, the work integrates folk vocal traditions, autobiographical testimony from local nurses and farmers, and improvisation.
The production's three-movement structure echoes the novel's narrative: the first is a performed account of Katita's backstory, told through movement, song, and fragments of dialogue in Punjabi; the second is a live preparation of traditional langar dishes (split-pea dal, wheat roti, sweet rice pudding) by the ensemble and audience together—no separation of watcher and maker; the third is a closing testimonial delivered by a rotating speaker, a different community member each night, who extemporaneously delivers Leif's twelve-word question in their own spoken Punjabi, their own words, from their own embodied understanding. No two performances are identical.
The work's title—Charity Platform (Daan da Manch)—operates on deliberate ambiguity: the theatrical stage as a platform for giving (daan, charity or gift-in-Sikh-theological-terms), and the stage as a threshold or liminal structure standing between surgery and sustenance, wounding and feeding, isolation and collective embrace. Notably, the collective distributes no written script; knowledge of the piece is transmitted orally, through embodied rehearsal, and through testimony. The stated aim was to "refuse the glitch" by creating a cycle that breaks itself each night—a refusal to solidify into canon, to allow the story to be born differently with each stranger who enters to eat and listen.