Far from the feudal

My Mirror column (14 Jun 2020):

Has Indian cinema gained or lost something as filmmakers become increasingly distanced from the village?

Recently, while on a video call with a novelist friend, I mentioned writing a series of columns on Indian films about the migrant experience, including Muzaffar Ali's Gaman (1978), in which Farooque Shaikh played a young man who has to leave his Uttar Pradesh village to become a taxi driver in what was then Bombay. “Gaman is a good film,” conceded my friend, a less forgiving film viewer than me. “But it presented the local raja as this very nice man, and then I realized the filmmaker is talking about himself!” I said, well, it was the 1970s, so more likely a fictionalisation of the filmmaker's father – one degree of separation. And my friend and I laughed.

But it is indeed true that the village in which the film is shot was (and was shown to be) Kotwara, District Kheri, UP – the place that Muzaffar Ali's ancestors have ruled for generations. So when Farooque Shaikh's on-screen mother tells her on-screen daughter-in-law Smita Patil that “Raja Sahab vilayat jaane se pehle gale lagaaein aur kahein, 'Aap mere bade bhai hain',” that expansive gesture of personalised generosity was how the film chose to characterise the area's ruling feudal family – the family to which the filmmaker himself belonged. The straitened circumstances of the Farooque Shaikh character, meanwhile, were blamed on an upper caste landlord who had established himself as a middleman.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because Gaman is one of the rare films made in India to deal sensitively with the pressures of migration; to depict the way large swathes of rural India have become unsustainable for their inhabitants, pushing people out into our cities, where they must then live depleted lives in crowded, often forcibly unsanitary circumstances, away from loved ones – until that life, too, is made unsustainable by an unprecedented state-created crisis like the Covid-19 lockdown. Beginning with an ethnographic eye – the women and children of the village, sitting silent and watchful, overlaid with Hira Devi Mishra's unforgettable rendition of Ras Ke Bhare Tore Nain, or a little later, what looks like wonderful documentary footage of the local Muharram celebrations, Gaman used a more mainstream fictional narrative – including some very fine songs -- to get its viewers to feel for the poor rural migrant.

So it seemed important that Gaman's creator came from the top of that rural hierarchy. It was Muzaffar Ali's feudal background that actually connected him with the village – and later took him back there to found a designer clothing line that employs local artisans. Ali was never going to be a poor villager, but he had clearly met several, and was able to generate the creative compassion needed to tell their story. Once I started to think about it, all the films I'd been writing about these past few weeks felt like they needed to be seen again through the lens – pardon the pun -- of their creators.

Three and a half decades before Gaman, the migrant's story had been told in Bimal Roy's classic Do Bigha Zamin, which drew on a Tagore poem about a dispossessed peasant to create a film with a strongly socialist IPTA-inspired worldview, including a joyful immersion in India's folk traditions of music and dance. The callous zamindar who drives Do Bigha Zamin's peasant protagonist Shambhu to ruin was, of course, among many such villainous depictions of the time, including Pran as the lecherous, drunken Ugranarayan in Roy's own beautifully rendered supernatural romance, Madhumati. Was it of consequence that Bimal Roy came from a landowning family in Suapur, in former East Bengal? Was Ugranarayan informed, as Roy's daughter Rinki Roy Bhattacharya has suggested, by Roy's real-life uncle Jogeshchandra, whose indolent feudal lifestyle the lifelong teetotaller Roy clearly wished to keep at bay?

Such biographical questions may seem altogether too specific, and given our paucity of personal archives, necessarily speculative. But what I'm trying to get at is the fact that there was, in both theses cases, a connection with the village that allowed for the rural character to emerge on screen. Balraj Sahni, who played the peasant-turned-rickshawalla in DBZ, was so aware of his being urban that he spent a lot of time with a rickshawala who was a migrant. But when one actually reads about Sahni's life -- for instance, the Communist leader PC Joshi describing how Sahni's parents insisted on keeping a buffalo for fresh milk in their house in 1950s Bombay -- one realises that the connections between the urban and the rural in that India were still stronger than we can dream of.

In a book of interviews called Rendezvous With Hindi Cinema (2019), the director Dibakar Banerjee makes the point sharply. “Earlier, there was some kind of a connection. It's a paradox, that connect was feudalism. Feudal families would send their children to study in colleges in Bombay or Delhi. But they'd go back for vacation and see the real, poor, feudal India, where they would be the lords,” he says, speculating for instance about the powerfully anti-feudal films of Shyam Benegal. “But the present generation of filmmakers is even more cut off from rural India, poor India,” Banerjee says.

It is hard to disagree with the fact that even the alternative, non-Bollywood cinema of the last decade is almost entirely urban. There are rare exceptions, but they prove the rule, like a Peepli Live (2010), where the village's desperation for visibility is tied to its appearance on screen -- but as the locale for a media circus. For a more recent film set entirely in a North Indian village, I can only think of Gamak Ghar – which proves the point, too, because it is the young urban filmmaker memorialising the village his parents left behind. Our films may be further from the feudal than they once were, but it looks like they are also further from the rural.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Jun 2020.

Driven from home - II

My Mirror column (31 May 2020):
 
The second of a two-part column.

Balraj Sahni's suffering rickshawala in Do Bigha Zamin (1953) inaugurated a migrant worker narrative whose themes continue to resonate tragically, in our films and reality.

The migrant narrative in Indian cinema is that no-one leaves home if they don't have to. In Muzaffar Ali's Gaman (1978), which I wrote about earlier this month, Ghulam (Farooque Shaikh) only decides to leave his Awadh village when he realizes that there is no work for him there, and increasingly little income. The local landlord has taken advantage of Ghulam's father's death to gobble up the better portion of his land. And Ghulam has a friend (Jalal Agha) who has been talking up the city as a place overflowing with money. The city is as much of a last resort in Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953), which I started to write about last week. The protagonist Shambhu (Balraj Sahni) is desperate not to lose his land to a cheating zamindar, and the city seems the only possible way to earn the money he needs. But it is the 1950s, and Shambhu has no friends in Calcutta. He hears of one villager who works as a 'boy' in Firpo's Hotel. “What's a 'boy'?” Shambhu asks. “Must be some important position, he wears a fancy uniform,” comes the answer. A similar ironic register reappears a little later when Laloo the shoeshine boy points out the Grand Hotel to Shambhu's little son Bachhua as the place where he lives. He neglects to spell it out: on the pavement.

The pavement does end up being a temporary home to Shambhu and Bachhua, just as it is to Raj Kapoor in films like Shree 420 and Phir Subah Hogi. And on the pavement, that very first night, they find themselves beside a man who yells in his sleep, reliving every night the mill accident in which he lost a limb. That accident reference seems to presage the dangers of industrialisation: the dangers the machine can pose to the human body. The accident will hit closer home later in the film, through a chilling scene in which a pair of urban lovers make two rickshawallas race each other. And you see it instantly then: that what is dangerous is not the machine, but the human being callous enough to treat other human beings like machines.

Not all humans in the city are callous, though. In Roy's vision of the city, the poor help each other out, forging bonds across region and language and community. The Bengali woman who controls the slum has adopted the orphaned girl from Bihar as her 'granddaughter'. The sick older man in the adjacent kholi (Nazir Hussain) whom Shambhu helps out becomes his route to pulling a rickshaw.

Young Bachhua makes fast friends, too. He learns to polish shoes from Laloo, and at one juncture, befriends a pickpocket. Alongside making direct references to Awara, DBZ uses the pickpocket as the figure against which the honest hero must define himself. But Bachhua's plotline with the young pickpocket is also a way for the film to step away from being preachily unrealistic. Through Bachhua's eyes, we see how the temptation of dishonesty rises with the sheer impossibility of trying to make an honest living when you have no access to capital. And in his pickpocket friend's attempt to help him, we see quite clearly that the thief can be a good friend. Most remarkable, though, is the scene where the pickpocket jeers at Bachchua for imploring him. Begging, DBZ suggests perspicaciously, is against the honour of thieves.

But unlike in Bicycle Thieves, where we empathise with the adult protagonist who finds himself reduced to theft, DBZ's empathy has a limit. The boy can be forgiven for a lapse, but the adult man cannot succumb at any cost. Balraj Sahni's portrayal of Shambhu takes the dignity of labour to its acme, continuing to take two little girls to their school when their middle class father can no longer afford the cost of the daily rickshaw ride.

That theme of heroic honesty was repeated in several other films that decade, about migrants who came to Calcutta from even further away – the dry-fruits trader from Afghanistan in the case of Tapan Sinha's 1957 Bengali film Kabuliwala, remade in Hindi in 1961 by Hemen Gupta with Sahni in the lead role, and the cloth-pedlar from China in the case of Mrinal Sen's breakout film Neel Akasher Neechey (1959). But in DBZ, as in so many Indian classics of the 1950s, from Pyaasa to Shree 420, the hero's exhortation to honesty is couched in terms that pit the city against the village: “Kisaan ka beta hoke tune chori ki? (You're the son of a farmer, and you stole?)” Shambhu berates Bachhua.

But heroic honesty does not bring any of these migrant heroes either joy or justice. What seems to govern these tragic lives is the accident. The accident that injures Shambhu in Do Bigha Zamin propels the family into an abyss from which they look unlikely to emerge at film's end. The accident recurs in later Indian films about migrants – Gaman in 1978, or two other films I wrote about recently, Liar's Dice, which premiered at Sundance in 2013, and I.D. (2012), which should be watched more widely. In Gaman, an accident kills another taxi driver: someone close to the hero. In Liar's Dice, the female protagonist makes her way to the city because her migrant husband has stopped answering messages (just like Nirupa Roy's Parvati did in DBZ) -- and learns that an accident has claimed him.

In Chaitanya Tamhane's quietly astounding Court (2015), a sewage worker's accidental death is sought to be pinned on a Dalit shahir's song about suicide. But as every worker knows, when no safety nets are provided, an accident is just a euphemism for institutionalised murder. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 May 2020. The first part of this column is here.

Driven From Home - I

My Mirror column (24 May 2020):

It’s time to revisit Bimal Roy’s 1953 neorealist melodrama, Do Bigha Zamin, which remains one of the earliest and most moving depictions of the urban migrant in Indian cinema

Another poster for Do Bigha Zamin (1953), designed by the artist Chittaprosad

A poster advertising Do Bigha Zamin in the 15 May, 1953 issue of Filmfare contains eight moments from the film etched into memorable black-and-white linocuts by the artist Chittaprosad. Linocut 5, at the centre of the page, foregrounds a young boy, barefoot, a palm held up to his face, as if he's just been slapped. The blank wall to the right is occupied by “Vote For” graffiti, above which is a strategically-placed poster of a gun-toting gangster, captioned “Criminals”. Behind the boy, the Indian city is pared down to its essentials: a mailbox, a lamppost, tall buildings -- and two other children: one polishing shoes under a streetlight, and the other being marched away by a uniformed policeman.

If you have never seen Bimal Roy's era-defining film -- or even if you have -- now is the time to revisit it. Perhaps in this cruel summer of 2020 you will see, as I did, that it is not some timeless tale of a single hard-working farmer stripped of his land by feudal exploitation, but a very particular postcolonial Indian story, in which Shambhu's dispossession is caused much by pre-modern landholding structures as by modern-day legal injustice (perhaps you'll hear the mocking laughter of the lawyers in the courtroom scene, as the non-literate Shambhu's oral calculation of his dues is superseded by the zamindar's duplicitous figures, for which Shambhu's own fingerprints become legal 'evidence'). Perhaps you'll see that this is a film as much about the city as the village, and that while it pinpoints the shortages and shortcuts that already marked the lives of India's urban poor, it is also, like the early cinema of Raj Kapoor, KA Abbas and others, filled with the warmth of nascent urban communities. Perhaps you'll see, like the great Chittaprosad did, that as crucial as the film's adult tragedies are the moral dilemmas of Shambhu's little boy Bachhua (played by Ratan Kumar, a much-favoured child actor of the time, who was soon to be seen polishing shoes again in Prakash Arora's 1954 film Boot Polish, produced by Raj Kapoor). Perhaps you will notice the film's depiction of 1950s Calcutta, with its white colonial buildings gleaming in the sunlight and its neon signs for Kodak and Polar and Castrol and KC Das glittering through the nights, and the poor homeless people who sleep under them – and think about whether the city currently suffering the debilitating effects of Cyclone Amphan is any different.

Bimal Roy, who had begun his career as a camera assistant at Calcutta's New Theatres, moved to Bombay in the early 1950s with a team of talented crew members that included such future stalwarts as Salil Choudhury and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. He had already made his directorial debut in Bengali with Udayer Pathe, which Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen describe in their Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema as “introducing a new era of post-WW2 romantic-realist melodrama that was to pioneer the integration of the Bengal school with that of De Sica”.

Do Bigha Zamin, Roy's Hindi debut, was crucial to continuing that trajectory, and it is unsurprising that it took him back to Calcutta. The film reveals a very particular constellation of influences, reflective of the time and the people who came together in it. The core idea, of a peasant robbed of his small plot by an avaricious zamindar, came from a Rabindranath Tagore poem in Bengali, called 'Dui Bigha Jomi'. The poem was turned into a short story by Salil Choudhury, which also formed the basis of Satyen Bose's Bangla film called Rickshawala. Choudhury's story was reworked into a 24-page screenplay by Hrishikesh Mukherjee (also credited as Editor and Assistant Director), which became a Hindi film with the assistance of Paul Mahendra's Hindi dialogues.

The IPTA connections were also important here. Launched in 1943, the Indian People's Theatre Association was informally affiliated to the Communist Party of India, and had links with the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). It was a nationwide network composed of travelling musical and theatre groups focused on reclaiming and working with vernacular folk traditions in various parts of the country, particularly Bengal, Telengana, Kerala, and later also Assam, Punjab, Orissa and urban centres like Mumbai. “For a brief period following WW2 and in the early years of independence,” write Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, “virtually the entire cultural intelligentsia was associated with or influenced by IPTA/PWA activities...”. Salil Choudhury was a self-taught composer who had been a peasant activist in Bengal, and began his musical journey scoring for IPTA plays. Bimal Roy's own Udayer Pathe also drew heavily on IPTA style. Sahni, too, was a regular IPTA actor, and had previously played a peasant in the IPTA-backed film Dharti Ke Lal (1947).

The Tagore poem does not contain the spectre of the factory as the zamindar's reason for land-acquisition. In it, the dispossessed farmer becomes a mendicant's assistant. But the film -- informed as much by Vittorio De Sica's visuals of a father-son duo grappling with the city in Bicycle Thieves as by the Indian left's understanding of the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation -- turned its protagonist into a rickshaw-puller on the streets of Calcutta. 

The first part of a two-part column. The second part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 May 2020. 

The Romantic Realist

My Mirror column:

KA Abbas, who left us 30 years ago this June 1, spent a lifetime seeking to turn the dross of city life into fictional gold.

The opening scene of Bambai Raat ki Baahon Mein has the hero Amar Kumar (Vimal Ahuja) wading carefully into a swamp, his eyes fixed to the viewfinder of his camera. He takes a few shots – people washing in the dirty water, or attempting to clean their clothes on the edge. When he’s done, some locals ask if he has observed the poverty and pollution in which they are living. “Yes, I saw, and the eye of my camera also saw.”

KA Abbas wrote and directed Bambai Raat ki Baahon Mein (‘Bombay in the Arms of Night’) in 1967, creating a romantically-named suspense thriller charged with his characteristic ethical quandaries – here in the shape of a journalist who finds himself in an ethical dilemma. Amar’s expose of the pitiable condition of workers in Daleriawadi catches the eye of the factory owner Seth Sonachand Daleria, who invites him to Delhi and tries to buy him off. What Daleria offers Amar is much more than a bribe: he holds out the salary and perks of what is essentially a corporate communications job – a free house, free car, and tickets to New York, London, Paris.

The scene between Amar and the usually mild-mannered AK Hangal as the wily Daleria is one of the best things about the film – partly because Abbas, who would have known Hangal personally from the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), could see him as a slightly sleazy old man long before Shaukeen (1981), and as a seasoned businessman long before Garam Hava (1974). But also because of the wryly convincing detail with which Daleria sets up the terms of Amar’s quandary: “Beinsaafi sirf mill mazdooron ke saath hi nahi ho rahi, tum jaise kaabil journaliston ke saath bhi ho rahi hai. Itne acche lekh likhne wale ko sirf 500 rupaye mahina? Usmein se bhi 50 rupaye income tax aur provident fund mein kat jaate hain... [Injustice is not being done only to the factory workers, it is also being done to a capable journalist like you. Only 500 rupees a month to a writer of such fine pieces? And of that too, 50 rupees goes to income tax and provident fund...].”

It is no coincidence that Abbas spent much of his working life as a journalist. Born in Panipat as the great-grandson of Muslim poet and reformer Mohammad Altaf Hussain Hali, Abbas started bringing out a university newsletter while still a student of law at Aligarh Muslim University, while also writing articles and letters to the editors of various publications -- “using different pseudonyms to avoid identification,” according to his translator-editor Suresh Kohli.

Law did not work out, and he moved to Bombay, taking a job at the Bombay Chronicle. Even after he started to write plays (beginning with IPTA’s Zubeidaa) and then film scripts (starting with Dharti Ke Lal, also IPTA, and like Zubeidaa, involving Balraj Sahni), Abbas remained committed to journalism, writing what used to be the longest-running weekly column in India: 'The Last Word', in Russi Karanjia's Blitz. The column also appeared in Urdu under the title Azad Kalam (‘The Free Pen’), which is the name of the newspaper at which Amar works in Bambai Raat.

Although he was the director of 14 features, Abbas’s directorial abilities were uneven and most of his films sank at the box office. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this, until a few years ago, I thought of him as primarily a scriptwriter for Raj Kapoor films, including one of my all-time favourites, Shree 420.

A film that captured the Nehruvian zeitgeist like few others, Shree 420 also centres around an honest hero whom the big city tempts sorely, a young man torn between his genuine feeling for Bombay’s poor and the attractions of the high life. Watching Bambai Raat for the first time at an Abbas retrospective at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi this week, I could see the same dynamic in action quite clearly. There are other recognisable tropes – the evil capitalist is called Seth Sonachand in both films, while the young lovers find romantic fulfilment in the 10 paise ki chai on the street. The high life – and the lowness of that high life – is embodied in the figures of various women, and often mocked for its hypocrisy: in Bambai Raat, there is a “Dance, Dinner and Fashion Parade” organised to raise money for the Bihar famine, under the shadow of an exceptionally fine linocut of starving peasants, likely by the great artist Chittoprasad.

Despite its noirish aspirations – rain-slicked streets, fast cars, chases, party girls and even the stylish debutante Jalal Agha as a tragically hopeful party boy — there remains something prosaic about Bambai Raat. Abbas was well aware of his limitations -- but didn’t see them as such. In his autobiography he wrote: “My forays into the sanctified field of literature and even into the rarefied field of cinema have been described, and dismissed, as only the projections of my journalism... But good, imaginative, inspired journalism has always been indistinguishable from realistic, purposeful, contemporary literature.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 May 2017.

Note: Two other recent columns on journalists and journalism in Hindi cinema, here and here. 

A Political Actor

My Mirror column:

Balraj Sahni would have turned 104 on May 1. What made him such an unusual figure in Indian filmdom?

Measuring a film actor's contribution ordinarily means enumerating his screen appearances: "In a film career spanning 25 years, Balraj Sahni acted in over 125 films." But Balraj Sahni was no ordinary actor. Delivering the 1972 convocation address at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, Sahni stated the above fact - but far from sounding proud, he expressed regret at the "the special conditions of film making in our country" that had enabled it. 

"In the same period, a contemporary European or American actor would have done thirty or thirty-five. From this you can imagine... A vast number of books which I should have read, I have not been able to read. So many events I should have taken part in have passed me by... the frustration increases when I ask myself how many of these... films had anything significant in them?...Perhaps a few."

There are few people in any field, let alone the Indian film world, who can speak with such astonishing honesty about their careers or their industry. And Sahni's perspicacity went together with grace.

"[A] great many of our films are such that the very mention of them would raise a laugh among you... even though some of you may dream of becoming stars yourselves," said Sahni in the same address. "It is not easy for me to laugh at Hindi films. I earn my bread from them. They have brought me plenty of fame and wealth. To some extent at least, I owe to Hindi films the high honour which you have given me today." (That last sentence might betray a subtle sarcasm: PC Joshi, respected Communist Party of India (CPI) leader and Sahni's old friend, has written of how CPI(M) students at JNU had threatened to protest because "the university was being disgraced by inviting a film star to deliver its convocation address".)

Otherwise, Sahni's speech was exemplary: asking students to think about the great questions of their time, in a style that was lucid but not dumbed down. Reading it forty-five years later, in the week of Sahni's 104th birth anniversary, I am struck not just by the quality of his thought - asking sharp questions about the meaning of freedom, at a national level and an individual one, that no-one seems capable of asking even in 2017 - but by his keenness to reach out to his audience. That desire to communicate may well have been what united the disparate parts of Sahni's life: wanting to make other people think along with him.

After graduation, he may have considered teaching and journalism as a possible route to this. He and wife Damayanti spent 1937-39 in Santiniketan, with Sahni teaching Hindi at the university and absorbing whatever they could from what was then a uniquely fertile artistic environment. He also worked briefly in journalism in Lahore; then, in a year spent at Gandhi's ashram in Wardha, he helped edit a journal called Nai Taleem. When he sailed to war-time Britain, it was to work as a Hindi radio announcer at the BBC from 1940 to 1944. In Britain, the young couple arrived at two decisions - one, to join the Communist Party (it was Damayanti who joined first), and two, to return to India and work as actors.

Soon after their arrival in Bombay, they discovered the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). At the first meeting Sahni attended, K.A. Abbas - then an acquaintance -- dropped a bomb by announcing that the next IPTA play, Zubeidaa, would be directed by Sahni.

The association with IPTA was to last for many years. Writing, directing and acting in plays that drew upon Indian folk forms - jatra in Bengal, tamasha in Maharashtra, nautanki in Uttar Pradesh -- but delivering progressive messages turned out to be something Sahni was very good at. IPTA also produced a film called Dharti ke Lal (1946) - directed by Abbas, with a script based on two Bangla plays by Bijon Bhattacharya about the Bengal famine and a Krishen Chander story. Sahni was an Assistant Director, as well as playing the elder brother who struggles to keep the family land from being sold.

Balraj Sahni in Waqt, as the still-in-love Lala Kedarnath

Sahni soon became a popular actor, appearing in more mainstream films. He never developed anything like a star persona. And yet, the roles he played did perhaps have something in common. In Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen, he played a character very different from but sociologically akin to Dharti ke Lal - afarmer who had lost his land to the moneylender and been forced to work as a rickshaw-puller in the city. The alienation of labour from land and the miseries of forced migration have never been more powerfully embodied in an actor's face.

In unlikely milieus like Dharti ke Lal and Do Bigha Zameen, he had already offered glimpses of the loving, even companionate, long-term marriage. And then there is Yash Chopra's Waqt, where his romancing of on-screen wife Achala Sachdev as his Zohra-Jabeen remains a fixture for singing uncles.

But in several other films (Amiya Chakrabarty's 1955 Seema, Shahid Latif's 1958 Sone ki Chidiya and Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1960 Anuradha), Sahni played the idealistic man who places a larger social cause above a woman's emotional needs - and his own. His last great role - in MS Sathyu's Garm Hava - also showed us a man torn between the personal and the political. Perhaps that was where his strength lay: in knowing how deeply those two things are intertwined - and being able to convey the hurt when they insisted on pulling apart.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 May 2017.

Post Facto - Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre: Newness arising from the old

My Sunday Guardian column this fortnight: Habib Tanvir abib Tanvir created the repertory company Naya Theatre along with his wife-to-be Moneeka Misra in 1959 and ran it for the next fifty years. (Their daughter Nageen Tanvir continues to run it.) What was unique about Naya Theatre was that it was created with a group of nacha actors from Tanvir's native Chhattisgarh, who performed in their vivid, physical nacha style in Naya Theatre's productions of Shakespeare, Brecht and Sanskrit classics, as well as fresh interventionist plays written by Habib Saab. Habib Tanvir's account of how he came to work with these actors is as fresh and direct as one could ask for: "when I had come back from Europe in 1958, before beginning Mrichchakatika, I went home to Raipur to meet my family... I heard that there was to be a Nacha on the grounds of the high school where I was educated — Nacha is a Chhattisgarhi form of secular drama. It was to start at nine o'clock. I saw it all night through, which is the usual duration for a Nacha. They presented three or four skits. There was Madan Lal, a great actor. Thakur Ram, another great actor, Babu Das, a very good actor too, Bhulwa Ram, a glorious singer: and what comedians, these fellows, like music hall comedy. They were doingchaprasi nakal, sadhu nakal (take-offs). I was fascinated. I went up to them and said — would you like to come to Delhi and join me in a production?" Of course, even a marvellous stroke of inspiration such as the one above does not automatically translate into a lifetime's body of work. The forced brevity of this interview (given to Seagull Theatre Quarterly in 1996) could suggest a grand beginning leading seamlessly into a legendary career. But Habib Tanvir is not the man to elide the many stumbling blocks to a new theatrical vision. In an appendix to his marvellously frank memoirs — translated from his inimitable colloquial Hindustani to a deliberately unregimented English by Mahmood Farooqi — he offers us glimpses of the ruthless unlearning and slow, rigorous absorption that went into the process. Initially, he says, "I was trying to apply my English training on the village actors — move diagonally, stand, speak, take this position, take that position. I had to unlearn it all. I saw that they couldn't even tell right from left on the stage and had no line sense." But instead of giving up in frustration, as a young man just back from RADA and watching Brecht in Berlin might be expected to do, Habib Tanvir went back to watch Nacha. He realised that what his actors had honed for years was an ability to respond to an audience that invariably surrounded them, to spontaneously shifting their focus to wherever the response was from. In making them change, he would lose their biggest strength. A similar realisation dawned on him with regard to language: that it was by letting the actors perform in their native Chhattisgarhi that they would sound truest and most confident. his ability to observe and learn from his actors, to incorporate into his form what came naturally to them — rather than trying to fit them into some pre-appointed grid — can be called anthropological, in the best possible way. But it was also, at its core, aesthetic — derived from Habib Saab's unstinting joy in the folk forms he adopted. He had spent much of the 1940s working with the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in Bombay, then a remarkably vibrant space in which writers, actors and musicians like Balraj Sahni, Dina Pathak (then Gandhi) and Shailendra, affiliated loosely or closely with the Communist Party, were producing plays in all languages: creating jatras in Bengali, drawing on tamashain Marathi. The IPTA's openness to existing Indian forms — linguistic, theatrical, musical — was probably a crucial influence on Habib Saab's own. But the memoirs, though incomplete — the first volume of a planned three-volume work — reveal a theatrical sensibility formed as much by a youthful ear for Chhattisgarhi songs and Urdu poetry, and an eye for visual flourish that goes right back to his childhood. We learn of the summer vacation when he first heard dadariya, "a self-composed song which proceeds in terms of questions and answers", outside Luhrakapa village, near Bilaspur. "Good dadariya has a compelling force, and girls are known to elope with their lovers under its spell, therefore it is forbidden to sing it inside the village." We hear how he wept copiously through his first play at Raipur's Kali Bari — but he manages to recall that the curtains "rose up and disappeared" rather than parting sideways as they do now. Describing the silent cinemas of his youth, he paints a fantastic portrait of one Chunnilal who first sold tickets, then entered the hall and provided a hilariously poker-faced commentary throughout the film. Writing about showing old films to students at Pune's Film Institute, Tanvir elucidates his philosophy more lucidly than I ever could: "It is important to know the tradition not because it is holy or deserves worship but because it is only the tradition and the canon that allows us to chart new paths, even if it involves a breaking up of the old." This was a deeply secular man who worked throughout with the religiosity of his actors, drawing on the theatre of their ritual. And yet he never shunned the urban modern person: among his most remarkable statements is that his film reviews for radio in the 40s were based on conversations with taxi drivers who "always had something original to say". "Often, all I did... was to quote them." If only we could all listen like Habib Tanvir did.