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.

Sea of Stories: Dastangoi in Delhi

A theatre preview piece for Time Out Delhi:

Audiences aren't flocking to watch dastangoi just because it's a lost art. It's supremely entertaining as well.

Photograph: Abhinandita Mathur

Mahmood Farooqui’s first exposure to dastans was through his father, who often told him to read the single volume of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza which they had at home “to improve his Urdu”. Farooqui was arrested by the fluidity and beauty of the language and by the richly-peopled world of the dastans, where Amir Hamza (uncle of the Prophet Mohammad) sets out to conquer evil, having adventures involving demons, magical beings and tricksters of all sorts on the way – but neither he nor his father imagined that the lost art of dastangoi would be revived in performance by Mahmood himself. “It started when I got an Independent Fellowship from Sarai, a research initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), to study the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. The Urdu version printed in the 1890s, is in 46 volumes, and the only person who has the complete collection is the Urdu scholar SR Farooqui, who happens to be my uncle,” said Mahmood. “But it was a research project. In fact, in March 2005, I was planning a lecture based on my research at the India International Centre, when the IIC people said, why don’t you do a lec-dem? It struck me that the best way of demonstrating the power of the form was to actually perform the dastans. The text demanded to be read aloud.”

Farooqui had little to go by, because almost nothing is known about the conditions in which traditional dastangos showcased their art. It is possible that they had musical accompaniment, and also that large illustrated panels were held up behind the dastango, but what they wore, whether they sat or stood or moved about is unknown. But that first performance at the IIC, which Farooqui did in collaboration with his friend Himanshu Tyagi, was a great success. “It was an invited audience, so there were a lot of Urduwallas, but also regular IIC types and people from Sarai. We weren’t expecting much, but there was a lot of wah-wahi, people were very forthcoming with feedback, and the IIC invited us back to its festival later that year,” Farooqui reminisced. After Tyagi moved to Mumbai in early 2005, Farooqui found a new partner in Danish Husain.

“I remembered Danish from Habib Tanvir’s play Agra Bazar,” said Farooqui. Husain, on the other hand, remembered watching Farooqui and Tyagi perform in Dehra Dun in October 2005. “I was awestruck by the form,” he said, “but when Mahmood asked me to perform with him, I was unsure that I had the capability.” He was persuaded, however, and the duo did their first show together in March 2006. “Traditionally, the dastango performed alone, but I think the idea of two performers is a coup. It breaks the monotony for the audience, and it helps the actors – the moment one is tired, the other steps in,” said Husain.
“And we complement each other: one man is frail and elegant, the other is rotund and rustic. Mahmood is more poetic, eloquent. I’m more rough, more theatrical, like a bhaand. This doesn’t mean that I can’t recite poetry, or that Mahmood can’t be funny, but that’s how things tend to get divided.”

The Farooqui-Husain team has now done at least 30 shows together, mostly performing sections from a single chapter of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza called the “Tilism-e-Hoshruba”. “The title has been translated as “An Enchantment that Steals Away the Senses”, but tilism is virtually untranslatable. It can mean an enchantment, a magical effect, but also an alternative world created by that effect,” said Farooqui. Tilism, however, is only of the four elements of the traditional dastan: the others are razm (warfare), bazm (the world of music, dancing and seduction) and aiyyari (trickery or disguise). Fantasy is thus an integral part of the tales, but they’re also an incredible fund of realistic depictions of Indian life. Magical forests coexist with cities afflicted by famine and fire, shape-shifters walk cheek-by-jowl with miserly banias and flirtatious women.

Has the fantastical quality of the tales made them difficult to appreciate for contemporary urban audiences? Or do people in Delhi and Lahore and Mumbai approach dastangoi through a nostalgic lens – assuming that one can be nostalgic for something one has never known? “Well, certainly there is some nostalgia about two men in Lucknawi attire sitting with a masnad and telling stories in Urdu. I’m uncomfortable with that, but I also know that people’s enjoyment doesn’t rest on nostalgia. Nostalgia may keep them there for 10 minutes, but after that they’re getting into the stories. And if the story is working for you, if it has enough to keep you entertained, it is connected to your world, it has become contemporary,” Farooqui said. “I have felt some pressure to contemporanize the dastans. And yes, these are magical stories, you could go anywhere, you could be in Bushland and in Baghdad at the same time. But if people enjoy, say, classical music today, then it is already contemporary, it doesn’t need to be ‘updated’.”

Though happy with the reaction they’ve got so far, Farooqui is clear that dastans have it in them to go much further. “They straddle the elite and the popular, they invoke Islamicness in a very secular mould, one purely driven towards entertainment. I would like to take the form beyond theatre-going audiences.”

(Time Out Delhi, Sep 2007)