Old Magic In New Bottle Deptt.

Delhi now has a magic theatre. In a mall. I went. 

Until recently, the magic show in India had a well-defined aesthetic that drew on an imagined idea of royalty. The legendary PC Sorcar Senior and his son PC Sorcar Junior always dressed like over-the-top maharajas – bejewelled turbans, shiny kurta-churidars and glittering jootis – and most magicians followed suit. Tejas’s new magic performance, however, emerges out of a more contemporary fantasy world: Bollywood. 
 

The magician’s assistants are two young men in silver body suits and two young women who alternate between spangly black-fringed outfits, white satin gowns and silver miniskirts. The magician ( full name Tejas Malode), is a startlingly young man in a dark Chinese collar shirt, his hair gelled back to achieve the effect of something like sophistication. As the assistants twirl to an unidentifiable pop music track and a backdrop of coloured smoke, it feels like you’ve walked into one of Vikram Bhatt’s haunted romance flicks. 
  
The show has all the staples of a classic stage magic performance: he produces cards out of thin air, pulls coins out of a boy’s ear, nose and mouth, frees himself from a thick rope knotted round his wrists and knees, suspends his assistants and then an audience member in the air. Of course, no magic show is complete without the famous “sawing a woman in half” effect. Tejas’ version has a female assistant climb into a box, which he proceeds to divide into several horizontal sections that are pulled apart entirely then put together again.

Mumbai-based Tejas won the title of India’s Magic Star on Star One in 2010. Since then, he has been performing on cruise ships and in cocktail party acts – though only, he tells us, for Hollywood stars. The one cocktail act he does for us starts as a transformation: a bottle of Kahlua and a glass tumbler change places, change back, and then back again. Then it becomes what stage magicians call a production: making something appear out of nothing. Watching Tejas lift the yellow cylin­ders, first with curiosity, and then – as Kahlua bottles start to proliferate – with surprise, one realises how much of the effect of a magic show depends on the magician’s skills in acting and mime.

The other component of stage magic is to draw the audience in, and this Tejas does very well. In his version of the classic “pick a card”, he got a girl to pick a card from an “invisible” deck – essentially, to choose a card in her mind. Even better was his prediction act, where he opened a sealed box to reveal written predictions of the choices just made by three audience members. 

Tejas’s magic is perfectly competent, but the show’s cheesiness robs it of aura. But perhaps aura, like stage magic itself, lies in the eyes of the beholder. 

Magic Theatre is ongoing at Moments Mall, Kirti Nagar, New Delhi. 

(Published in Time Out Delhi)

Theatre in Delhi: shout-out for Begam ka Takiya & Kafka: Ek Adhyay

The National School of Drama Repertory Company is wrapping up its annual Summer Theatre Festival in Delhi this week. If you're in Delhi today, try and catch Ranjit Kapoor's splendid Begam ka Takiya (last two shows at 3.30pm and 7.00pm today, that's 12th June, at Kamani Auditorium, Copernicus Marg).

The last play of the festival is Suresh Sharma's highly suggestive production of Asif Ali Haider's Kafka: Ek Adhyay, which I saw in its 2007 avatar and reviewed for Time Out Delhi. You can read that review here though I have a strong suspicion that many of the superb NSD repertory actors I saw then have moved on since. But with such a strong script and visually arresting production, the play still ought to be worth a watch. Kafka: Ek Adhyay plays from 13th to 16th June at 7.00pm at Sammukh, NSD, Bhagwan Das Road.

Theatre Preview - Sarhad paar

A piece written for Time Out Delhi in 2007.

Usmaan Peerzada is bringing his nautanki-style play Patay Khan to Delhi this fortnight. Trisha Gupta finds him upbeat about Pakistani theatre.

Usmaan Peerzada’s Patay Khan is one of the most eagerly-awaited productions at this year’s Hungry Heart Festival. The play is a musical satire written by Imran Peerzada, Usmaan’s younger brother and another member of the family that Pakistani newspaper The Nation described as “thespian and puppeteering royalty in Pakistan”.

“It’s a story about small people, with small problems,” said director Peerzada in a telephone conversation from Lahore. Patay Khan, which he described as “a nautanki in the pure Punjabi form”, opens in a small village where people are awaiting the arrival of the king. Before the king can show up however, the bureaucrats start conniving to ensure that no real communication takes place between ruler and subjects.

“We took stock characters from traditional puppetry and wove them into a play. So there’s the Nawab, and Kalkatte ki Gohar Jaan – I don’t know whether the character derives from the famous singer Gauhar Jaan. Patay Khan is the name of a thanedar, a bureaucrat, a guy who runs the show on behalf of the government. If someone acts important, hamare yahan kehte hain, ‘bada Patay Khan bana phirta hai’,” Peerzada explained.

Patay Khan has been staged in India before, at the National School of Drama’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav in January 2005. The Peerzadas – five brothers and two sisters – are the children of the late Rafi Peer (1898-1996), a pioneer of modern theatre in the subcontinent. Peer led an eventful life in an eventful time. Sent to study law in Oxford at 18, he got into a fight with a racist Englishman, left England and ended up in Berlin, where he fell in love with the theatre, working with Bertolt Brecht and training with Max Reinhardt’s Theatre Ensemble. But this was 1920s Germany. “In 1932-33, when the Nazis came to power, my father was first rounded up by the Gestapo, then presented to Goebbels (Hitler’s Propaganda Minister), who offered him a job: running the Voice of Berlin India broadcast, to get Indians to rise up against the British. My father decided it was time to leave.”

Back in India, Rafi Peer taught acting and direction at the Indian Academy of Dramatic Arts in Mumbai, while also writing exceptional radio and stage plays in Urdu and Punjabi, like Akhin. “He was from aristocratic Punjabi stock, so it was difficult for the family to accept: ‘yeh kya bhaand-mirasi ka kaam kar raha hai,’” said Peerzada. “The thing is, today, in Lahore, you can choose from among 16 plays on one evening, but they are all descendants of the same crude bhaand-mirasi style. Either that, or there are those snobbish NGO plays on women’s issues. Theatre is not about shouting slogans. It’s about joy – entertainment which makes people think.”

Apart from their own productions, the Peer Group runs three massive festivals – the World Performing Arts Festival, the International Puppet Festival and the Sufi Music Festival – giving people in Pakistan an opportunity to see productions from places like Ukraine and France. Peerzada is optimistic about the future of theatre in Pakistan. “Good work is being done by young people. In our Youth Festival, you can see the influence of international exposure. Things have changed drastically for the better in the last 11 years. Media is booming. We have a man in uniform running the government, but he has allowed freedom of expression."

Time Out Delhi ISSUE 3 Friday, May 04, 2007

At Delhi's Alter - Profile

On the eve of the performance of his new play, City of Djinns, Trisha Gupta speaks to Tom Alter about theatre and cinema, Delhi and Bombay, and playing William Dalrymple.

Tom Alter’s first memory of coming to Delhi dates back to a family trip made during Eisenhower’s visit to India. The Alters had come down from Rajpur (a town just below Mussoorie) to see the Republic Day Parade. “It must have been either 1957 or 1959. Watching the parade was a big thing at that time. Seeing the US President was okay, but to see Nehru – even from a distance – was to see a god of our childhood.” The parade was grand, but it went on and on and on – and seven-year-old Tom had to go to the bathroom. “There was no way to leave the premises – so eventually I just went behind the stands and did whatever I had to do,” laughed Alter.

Delhi remained a permanent fixture through Alter’s adolescent years in Mussoorie, as the place where you could do all the things you couldn’t do in a small hill station. “I must have taken every single mode of transport possible to get to Delhi from Mussoorie – bicycle, bus, taxi, car, motorcycle, plane,” said Alter. Many of those trips to the big city were pilgrimages to attend sports events – Ramanathan Krishnan playing at the Delhi Gymkhana, Bishan Singh Bedi playing his first international match (which wasn’t a test match, it was the President’s Eleven against the West Indies), and the Durand Cup. Then his parents moved to Delhi themselves – they lived in the city from 1969 to 1980. “First they were in Alipur Road, later in Jangpura Extension. They lived in a house on Birbal Road,” reminisced Alter. “I loved Delhi. In fact I was reluctant to go to Bombay, because I loved Delhi so much.”

But go to Bombay he did. Bitten early by the film bug, Alter went to FTII Pune, and arrived in Bombay in the mid-1970s. “I came to Bombay with one passion, that was films. I was never a theatrewala,” said Alter. “But great theatre has just come knocking on my door.” He was part of the formation of Motley in 1979, along with Naseeruddin Shah and Benjamin Gilani. Motley’s first production, Edward Albee’s Zoo Story inaugurated what Alter remembers as “a tremendous five-six years” for the group as well as for him personally. “I was privileged to be able to watch Naseer and Ben in our production of Waiting for Godot, which almost became synonymous with Motley. Such brilliant performances. Around the same time, in the late 70s, I remember Om (Puri) in Udhwasth Dharamshala. When I think of him in that play, I still get goosebumps. That’s one person I really wish would do more work on the stage,” Alter said. He paused for a moment and then went on, “Who knows, maybe Om might read your piece – and think about it.”

Alter stopped working with Motley around 1986-87. “I think my last Motley play was Arms and the Man.” Work in cinema, which had begun with ?? continued. But by the early ‘90s, Alter was completely taken up with a different medium: TV. “It was a hectic time. “There was one day of the week – I think it was Thursday – when I was on TV on seven different shows on the same day,” said Alter. With the crazy shooting schedules that entailed, there was simply no time to do theatre. “That kind of innings comes only once in a lifetime. I loved it, but I probably aged by about fifteen years in that five-year period,” Alter said half-ruefully. The return to theatre has been, yet again, unplanned. In 1999 or 2000, Alter started working with some Urdu poetry written by an old friend called Idraak Bhatti. At first it was only him reciting the poetry. Then his old FTII buddies, actor Uday Chandra and Chandar Khanna, got involved as well, with various acts of their own. “Uday used to do a performance of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where Gregor Samsa turns into a cockroach. It was a one-man show. And Chandar brought in his recitation of Jayadrath Vadh, the famous Nirala poem, which he had been doing for years.” After the addition of background music, some English poetry and some Bob Dylan songs, Alter, Chandra and Khanna put the show together for a performance at Mallika Sarabhai’s Darpana in Ahmedabad, in September 2001. It was Mallika’s mother Mrinalini Sarabhai who suggested the name Trisangha: three things coming together. “Trisangha has been like a garden for us, out of which amazing things have grown,” said Alter.

Being based in Mumbai means that most of Alter’s work on the stage is with Mumbai-based groups. But he has also worked with groups from Delhi, most notably with M Sayeed Alam in Maulana Azad, a play written and directed by Alam himself. “Playing Azad was an honour for me, a gift. To do a play on such an amazing man – and I think it’s the most beautiful original script – which runs for two and a half hours, with no interval, and just has one man talking on stage… It got good reviews, but I think Maulana has not, as a play about the ethos of twentieth century India, got the credit it deserves.”

Sayeed Alam returns the compliment. “I was looking for someone who had a command over Urdu, and so the choice was really between Naseeruddin Shah and Tom. In 1998, when I was writing the script, I happened to see Shatranj ke Khiladi, in which I felt that he was more comfortale in Urdu than Saeed Jaffrey, for whom it is a mother tongue!” saisd Alam.

Having worked in both cities, does he feel there’s a difference between the theatre scene in Mumbai and in Delhi? “I think people working in theatre in Delhi are if anything more passionate about it than in Bombay. The young talent in Alam’s plays – and now in City of Djinns – is humbling.”

City of Djinns is a theatrical adaptation of William Dalrymple’s celebrated portrait of Delhi, first published in 1993. Part travelogue, part history book, Dalrymple’s book weaves engaging accounts of different periods in Delhi’s history into a first-person narrative based on his own experience of the city. Since the book is 350 pages long and contains literally hundreds of characters, any attempt to stage it must necessarily involve choices about what to keep and what to leave out. Among the characters who have been retained are Mr and Mrs Puri, from whom Dalrymple rents a house, Balvinder Singh the taxi driver, BB Lal the archaeologist, Ahmed Ali the author of Twilight in Delhi, Shamim the calligrapher and his brother Ali who run a photo studio in Old Delhi, Begum Hamida Sultan and Nora Nicholson, the English lady who stayed on after independence. “The Nora Nicholson character is played by Zohra Saigal, so naturally it’s an important part in the play,” said Alter.

Dalrymple spent time in Delhi towards the end of the ‘80s and in the beginning of the ‘90s. “The book is a document of the time. He talks of how difficult it was to get a phone connection, or bring a personal music system into the country. Things have changed so much since then,” mused Alter. “If in 1990 someone had said that you could have 65 channels on TV, that you could buy Levis jeans, or talk to America for 3 rupees a minute, I wouldn’t have believed them.” And yet, Alter feels, there are many things about the city that haven’t changed as much as some people would like to believe. “Many people feel that Delhi has become sophisticated, and that people no longer talk the way Mrs. Puri did – talking about foreigners “making seven flushes in one night” and so on. But there are still so many Mrs. Puris in Delhi – lovely, earthy characters who speak English exactly in that way,” he said. Alter disagrees with people who think that Dalrymple makes fun of many of his characters. “It is not done with malice. Just like we make fun of the angrez in every second Hindi film.” While he believes that Dalrymple’s book has only gained from having “an outsider’s perspective,” he has a quibble with its claim that Urdu is dead in Delhi. “That’s absolutely wrong. Urdu may no longer be the language of the ruling classes, but there are lakhs of people here who live Urdu.”

As does Alter himself. Which is part of the reason why Rahul Pulkeshi, producer of the play, had no doubt that Alter was the man for the part. “To play Dalrymple, we needed someone who was white. But the play is about Dilli, history, tradition, ghazals, Sufis – we needed someone who could represent all these things. And who better than Tom?”

Published in Time Out Delhi, March 2007

The sounds of a vanishing world - Theatre Preview

Trisha Gupta finds that Telugu theatre in Delhi has a long and interesting history.

Minutes away from the madness of the ITO intersection, in a relatively-quiet lane behind Azad Bhavan, a group of sari-clad women are gathered in a large, rather bare room. There is no colour, no ornamentation; nothing except the faded remains of a Rangoli pattern painted on the mosaic. Two women pace the floor, gesticulating as they speak, while two others listen attentively. One woman is playing with a child, while an older, bespectacled woman sits on a chair, occasionally interjecting, a stapled sheaf of handwritten pages in her hand. The script of a play.

The scene would be interesting enough in itself – a play being rehearsed by an all-female cast – but it becomes even more so when it’s in Telugu. The hall, in fact, belongs to the Andhra Vanita Mandali, an organization for Andhraite women in Delhi, and the rehearsal in progress is for a play called Savitri Sawal, to be staged this fortnight by the Dakshina Bharata Nata Natee Samakhya. Apart from Savitri Sawal, a comedy that draws on the Savitri Satyavan myth to poke fun at modern middle class life, the DBNN will also present a more serious play, Repati Satruvu (Tomorrow’s Enemy), about the problems of old age.

The DBNN (often referred to simply as the Samakhya) was founded in 1958 by five young men who had arrived in the capital to study acting at the then-new Asian Theatre Institute, which later became the National School of Drama. Of the five men, three were from Andhra Pradesh, including the young Kuppili Venkateswara Rao, who had already founded well-known theatre groups in his home state: the Navya Kala Mandali in his hometown Rajahmundry, and the Rasana Samakhya in Vijayawada, where he was then working as a clerk in the railways. Now armed with theatre scholarships from the government of Andhra Pradesh, K Venkateswara Rao and his friends K Prasad Rao (also known as Cinema Prasad) and ‘Radio’ C Rama Mohana Rao borrowed money to get to Delhi. Once here, the trio started watching theatre with a passion and dreamt of staging Telugu plays in Delhi. K V Rao’s reminiscences of those days include a story about how he watched a Bengali play directed by stalwart Shambhu Mitra at AIFACS. “I went backstage to find out the expenditure incurred for the production. When told that it was Rs 380, my throat (became) parched… I came back without a word,” he wrote.

The problem of money was solved by a combination of generous patrons and self-imposed thrift, and the Samakhya staged its first play, Narasuraaju’s Naatakam, in 1959. Plays were rehearsed everywhere, from houses where they were driven out by irate landlords, to Delhi’s myriad tombs. It was the Andhra Vanita Mandli that gave the group its first – and lifelong – proper rehearsal space. “There is no doubt that having this space has helped the group a lot,” said Anuradha Nippani, regular actress and ex-General Secretary of DBNN.

In the first decade of its existence, the Samakhya produced an astounding sixty plays. The enthusiasm of the 1950s lasted well into the 60s and 70s, with new talent being recruited from among the streams of Andhraites who continued to arrive in the capital in search of government jobs. “My father-in-law came to Delhi in 1946. Over the years, he brought his three brothers as well as his two brothers-in-law,” said Nippani, who grew up in Andhra Pradesh and only came to Delhi after marriage. Despite the fact that there are now some 16 lakh Telugu speakers in Delhi, NS Kameswara Rao, one of the group’s veteran members and director of Repati Satruvu, points out that Andhra theatre no longer has the kind of support it once did. “In the 70s and early 80s, our shows in Kamani and Shri Ram Centre ran to packed houses. We took our plays to neighbourhoods, Janakpuri and JNU alike. In 1979, we staged the first Telugu street play in Delhi. Participation has certainly decreased since then, both of actors and audience,” he said. Rao traced the dwindling numbers to the screening of Telugu films in Delhi, which started in 1984. “It is not only the case with Telugu theatre, of course. Until fifteen years back, people would at least go and watch films in a hall. Now, they only sit in their drawing rooms and watch on a small screen.”

The Samakhya continues to do at least two plays a year. “We always do original plays, written in Telugu. Usually they are socially relevant, about contemporary themes,” said Nippani. The diasporic context also plays a role in their choice of scripts. “Like last year, we did a play foregrounding the Telugu language, about a family who go abroad and forget Telugu,” said M Kusuma, who has been active in the Samakhya and the Vanita Mandli for some forty years, and is directing Savitri Sawal. “We have only one young person, Kritika, who is acting this time,” Nippani points out. “What we need is for more young people to show an interest. But theatre takes so much commitment. And even my own children don’t really speak Telugu.”

Published in Time Out Delhi, September 2007

Dramatic Effect: Lokesh Jain

Trisha Gupta finds out where Lokesh Jain would like to take theatre when he's taken it out of Mandi House.

“Structure, like speed, can be very masculine,” said Lokesh Jain. “There is a need for structure, but also a need to break that structure at times.” Jain has always been interested in breaking strict boundaries, whether they’re those of form, class or community. His current solo performance based on Sharankumar Limbale’s autobiography, Akkarmashi, emerged out of a long engagement with theatre as a social art. “Theatre does not evolve in isolation. There is no theatre without social conflict,” stressed Jain, who began his involvement with drama through street-level interventions in Delhi after the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.

Jain may have been a theatre artist for 17 years, but he’s been a Dilliwala all his life. He grew up in Old Delhi, and still lives in the family home near Dilli Gate. His khadi kurta and scraggly beard may be completely at home in the comfortably arty environs of Triveni Tea Terrace, but Jain is deeply invested in taking theatre out of Mandi House and into the city’s schools and streets. He is a founding member and creative director of Jamghat, an organisation of and for street children in Delhi. He has been associated with the NGO Pravah for six years, and is also part of a collective of artists and development professionals called Mandala, whose Theatre-in-Education wing does plays and workshops for children. “We have taken well-known pieces like Ferdinand the Bull to different spaces, through theatre workshops in an orphanage near Jama Masjid,” said Jain.

Armed with an advanced diploma in acting from the Living Theatre Academy, where he trained in the early 1990s under Ebrahim Alkazi, Jain has long been experimenting with theatre that draws on local cultural forms. “You know, people in Manipur go on tiptoe to catch fish in the water – and that movement is incorporated in the region’s theatrical forms. And I count myself a murid [disciple] of Ratan Thiyyam, who is a master [of this sort of thing].” Jain’s realisation of the need to “explore one’s own roots” led to a consciousness that even urban settings have cultural conglomerations that are quite specific. “In Old Delhi, where I live, for instance, there is a composite culture, with Hindus and Muslims; there is an elite culture as well as a working class culture,” Jain said, describing how his interest in Delhi grew while researching an exhibition, “Shadow Uncensored”, in 1995-56. This interest led him to be part of KLOD-B (Knowing Loving Delhi Better), an organisation that he began with a group of friends in 1997-98 to explore the city on foot.

Jain’s concerns extend beyond the urban environment, though. He once evolved a version of Macbeth drawing on contemporary experiences “in the jungles of Assam”. Similarly, Akkarmashi, on this fortnight at The Attic, is based on the harrowing account of a childhood in a Maharashtrian village by the Dalit activist, writer, editor and critic Limbale. Caste made an appearance even in Premchand stories, Jain pointed out, “but a first-person narrative is different, it is painful for the audience and for me”. For Jain, this one man’s story describes “a 5,000-year-old history of suffering”, which he feels is getting lost in the current political climate. “I am not on any side. Party politics is all vested interests. Mine is simply a reaction to the violence that existed.

Time Out Delhi, 2007

Stamboul train: Mohan Maharishi's play 'Main Istanbul Hoon'

Published in the theatre pages of Time Out Delhi, Oct 2008: 

Trisha Gupta finds Mohan Maharishi travelling in time. Again.



Mohan Maharishi has never been to Istanbul. But he visits it all the time, in his mind. This fortnight, when his new production, Main Istanbul Hoon, opens its doors to the public, you can travel some of the way with him. It’s likely to be a complicated journey, moving not just from Delhi to Istanbul, but looping and whorling backwards in time, first to the mid-twentieth century and then the sixteenth. Maharishi hopes to conjure up something of the splendour and melancholy of another grand old city for Delhi’s audiences. “I’m interested in the resonances between Delhi and Istanbul. When I read histories of Ottoman Istanbul, I am reminded of Ghalib trudging knee-deep in blood, from Delhi to some place of sanctuary, in 1857,” he told us. “Both places have the same kind of division between Old City and New. In Delhi, there is also the third, which I sometimes call the ‘Ugly Delhi’, ever-spreading…”

Drawing on works by the celebrated Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, Main Istanbul Hoon has as its central character a crotchety, cynical old man called Resat Ekrem Kocu, a popular historian of Istanbul who spent much of his life writing historical columns for newspapers. Kocu appears in Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City, a somewhat eccentric figure, forever torn between his fascination with “the oddities, the weirdness of life in the margins” and his admiration for grand Western classificatory systems. The product of this conflict was his greatest labour of love: an anarchic encyclopaedia devoted to Istanbul, on which he spent 20 years, only to finally abandon it 11 volumes later, having reached the letter G.

Maharishi takes this fascinating – and all-too-real – character, and builds around him a theatrical web of fantasy. Gathering material for the 12th volume of his encyclopaedia, Maharishi’s Kocu travels to the sixteenth century, where a complicated love story is playing itself out (with more than a nod towards My Name is Red). A talented painter falls in love with his first cousin. Unable to deal with the wrath of her father, his uncle Usman, the painter leaves the city. Returning from his travels after 12 years, he is shocked by how much Istanbul has changed. “There is so much more traffic, noise, people…” Maharishi smiles at how this sixteenth-century reference is an indicator of our own times.

The creator of Einstein and Vidyottama discovered a long time ago that the stage offers unlimited creative possibilities if you want to play with time. “The old unities of time, place and character are not necessary. If you move convincingly between centuries, the audience will move with you,” he said. He reminisced about Einstein, possibly his best-remembered play, in which three Einsteins meet – the school-going child, the youthful one and the old professor in Princeton, very famous but marginalised. “No one questioned it,” Maharishi said. “The audience enjoyed the sensation. The young Einstein is excited. He’s going to propose to Mileva today; he’s full of her. The old one turns and says, ‘Mileva died today’. There is drama in this, drama created by time.”

Created for the National School of Drama’s golden jubilee celebrations and performed by the NSD’s highly competent repertory, Main Istanbul Hoon is simultaneously a love story set in sixteenth-century Istanbul and a paean to the city that lives on. It is also a tribute to Orhan Pamuk. “Pamuk writes about how, when he abandoned an architectural career, his mother was very angry. There’s a scene in my play, when his mother says, ‘You probably think you’re somewhere in Europe, where you say the word Picasso and the water freezes. But this is not Europe. This is Turkey, and who cares about art here?’” There are resonances here too. Maharishi can only hope that Delhi audiences will recognise them.

Time Out Delhi, Vol 2 Issue 15 (Oct 17 - Oct 30, 2008)

Super trouper: Arvind Gaur

Arvind Gaur tells Trisha Gupta what keeps Delhi’s most prolific theatre group going.

Once upon a time, Arvind Gaur used to study electronic engineering. He left it to join Navbharat Times, where he wrote a culture column. “You could say watching and writing about plays is how my training started. I used to do theatre too, mostly with activist groups. I did plays with the Delhi Public Library. The first street play I did was with Zakir Husain College, it was called Videshi Aaya.”Gaur started conducting theatre workshops with children, but he still needed a job. So he joined PTI TV, where he helped produce the popular show Tana-Bana. But all this was before he started Asmita in 1993. Since then, theatre has been his passion as well as his bread and butter.

Gaur has directed all of Asmita’s plays – and the group has 52 productions to its credit. Six of these – Moteram ka Satyagraha, 30 Days in September, Log-Baag, Rakt Kalyan, Court Martial and Operation Three Star – are being staged as part of Asmita’s summer festival. Does he never act? “I was never much of an actor. I have acted once or twice – usually under compulsion,” he grinned.

“Asmita’s first show was a performance of Bhisham Sahni’s award-winning play Hanush in the Sahitya Kala Parishad youth festival. But on the eve of the first proper public performance at Shri Ram Centre, the main actor backed out. Forty other actors were involved, and we had booked the hall. We made a supporting actor do the main role instead, and I took on the supporting role. The two of us – or at least I – did the play with the script in hand! That was the first and last time I acted in an Asmita play.”

It was this unfortunate experience that triggered Gaur’s decision that Asmita plays would have only in-house actors. “We take whoever comes to us, regardless of experience. But we put them through an intensive programme of theatre workshops. Our actors are divided into three tiers: senior actors, with the greatest level of experience; mid-level actors, with some experience; and finally, people who are more or less newcomers to theatre.” In productions with a small cast, only senior Asmita actors get to be on stage. The larger the cast, the more likely it is that second-tier actors might get a role. “We also have in-house productions, in which all parts are played by junior actors, and the whole group gives them feedback.”

While old-timers like Jaimini Srivastava and Deepak Kochani continue to be associated with the group, Asmita has also been a training ground for younger actors. “In our 1995 production of Tughlaq, with Jaimini Kumar in the title role, a young chap called Deepak Dobriyal played a soldier. You would have seen him recently in Omkara, as Kareena’s rejected bridegroom.” Dobriyal was with Asmita for several years, as was Kangana Ranaut (of Gangster fame). Does this migration of actors from Delhi theatre to Bombay cinema bother him? “Not at all. I think this generation is more target-oriented. They may use theatre as a stepping stone to cinema or TV, but if theatre doesn’t provide people a living, how can you blame them? Also, it’s the theatre-walas who have changed the quality of acting in our films. It’s a symbiotic relationship.” Though distressed at the monopolisation of government funds by a small group of nationally-acclaimed directors, Gaur remains optimistic about the future of Delhi theatre. “Nowadays, there is a lot more emphasis on theatre-training. Asmita has a lot to do with this. Many of our actors have formed their own groups.”

But in an era when so many Hindi groups seem to be turning to comedy to get the crowds in, how has Asmita managed to survive financially, doing mostly “serious” plays? “I have nothing against comedy – in fact I think it’s the most difficult thing to do well. Moteram ka Satyagraha is very funny. But somehow my sensibility is such that even when I try to do comedy – like Chekhov’s stories in Log-Baag – the play somehow transforms itself into something darker,” Gaur said ruefully. “Financially, we manage because all our actors contribute to the running of the group, the rent for our rehearsal space, etc. For the actual shows, we get some money when we’re invited to perform in other cities. And I am constantly conducting workshops – for colleges, at the Habitat Centre and elsewhere. That money goes into Asmita’s coffers. Thankfully, the audience has supported us.”

Although Asmita under Gaur’s direction does only what he calls “socially and politically relevant theatre”, Gaur has no illusions about theatre’s revolutionary potential. “Revolution is not so easy to bring. Ab tak kranti jo hai woh JNU se nikalkar Munirka tak nahi pahunchi. But we try to bring about a dialogue with the audience.” Asmita’s shows of Final Solutions, Mahesh Dattani’s play about communal conflict, and 30 Days in September – a play about child sexual abuse, also written by Dattani – are often followed by animated discussions between the actors and the audience. “After a recent show of 30 Days, three people came out and said that after watching the play, they felt able to speak about their experience of abuse for the first time. That gives us a feeling of achievement.”

Published in Time Out Delhi, May 2007

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)

The Shadow Lines: Toba Tek Singh

Pakistani director Madeeha Gauhar on why Manto’s Toba Tek Singh must be staged everywhere.

“Two or three years after Partition, it occurred to the governments of Pakistan and Hindustan that like criminal offenders, lunatics too ought to be exchanged: that is, those Muslim lunatics who were in Hindustan’s insane asylums should be sent to Pakistan, and those Hindus and Sikhs who were in Pakistan’s insane asylums should be confined to the care of Hindustan.” So begins Sa'adat Hasan Manto’s famous Urdu story 'Toba Tek Singh'. In Manto’s inimitable style, the entire story is presented as a poker-faced account of the events at the Lahore asylum, leading up to the moment of actual exchange at the border, when the story’s central figure refuses to budge in either direction, insisting that his birthplace, Toba Tek Singh, is right there, in the no man’s land between the two countries. No authorial comment is made – and none is needed.

“There can be no better metaphor for the insanity of Partition,” said Madeeha Gauhar, founder and director of Pakistani theatre troupe Ajoka, which has been invited to stage their theatrical adaptation of the story in Delhi on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Independence – and of Partition. “Manto exonerates no-one. You are left with the question of who were the actual lunatics– the inmates of the mental hospital or those who made the decision to divide a country into two. It’s a very powerful comment.”

Powerful it certainly is, but don’t the economy and subtle irony of Manto’s literary style make him an extremely difficult writer to dramatise? “It is very difficult to do Manto,” agreed Gauhar. “There are many things in the subtext for which you have to create dialogue, to give the piece some body – and yet not deviate from what the author intended. But Shahid Nadeem’s adaptation is a very good one.” Nadeem’s script also incorporates other work by Manto: excerpts from the anecdotal Siyaah Hashiye (Black Margins), as well as a stylized enactment of the chilling story “Khol Do”. “In Toba Tek Singh, the characters are all men. We added “Khol Do” is because it brings in the experience of women. And we insert it at an appropriate juncture, where the neighbour comes to meet the protagonist. When he mentions the daughter, he hesitates. That moment of hesitation makes clear that something has happened to her, as it did to thousands of women across the subcontinent.”

Ajoka has been performing Toba Tek Singh since 1992, but the establishment’s view of the story as “anti-Pakistan” meant that it was impossible to get a proper venue. “All good auditoriums in Lahore are government-owned. So we staged the play in smaller, less public spaces. The first time we did a properly public show was three years ago, at the Lahore Arts Council,” Gauhar said. Ajoka’s persistence in this case is an example of its commitment to doing socially relevant theatre, even if it pits them against the official line. Their 2006 production, Dukh-darya, based on the true story of a woman in Azad Kashmir who is raped and gives birth to a child, engages with the continuing effects of Partition in terms of the question of identity: who is a Indian and who is a Pakistani? More recently, ten Ajoka members were part of a Kewal Dhaliwal-directed production called Yatra 1947, which emerged out of an NSD workshop in Amritsar and draws on post-1947 poetry from both sides of Punjab.

In a small way, the group’s efforts have managed to break the conspiracy of silence. Toba Tek Singh is today a play performed in colleges – and even schools – in Lahore. Ajoka has even taken the play to what one might think of as its birthplace – Toba Tek Singh, in District Shekhupura in the Pakistani province of Punjab. “Toba means talaab, a pond. The town is named after a Sikh philanthropist who built a source for water there,” said Gauhar. “And unlike everywhere else in Pakistan, the portrait in the District Collector’s office there was of Toba Tek Singh – not of Jinnah or Iqbal. It was strange. And very moving.”

Published in Time Out Delhi, Aug 2007

Time warp: Banabhatta ki Atmakatha

MK Raina’s fascinating play asks questions of history and context, and of its audience as well.

MK Raina may not have directed a play at the National School of Drama for the last 12 years, but his association with the NSD goes back a long way – he graduated from the School in 1970 and taught there briefly in 1976-77. Among Raina’s students at the time was Amitabh Srivastava. That’s the other long-standing connection that’s made the current production possible – Srivastava, now an established theatre actor and translator, has adapted the novel Banabhatta ki Atmakatha, timed to coincide with the birth centenary year of its author Hazari Prasad Dwivedi (1907-79).

“The first time MK and I worked together was in 1985-86, when I adapted Jagdish Chandar’s novel Kabhi Na Chhode Khet,” remembered Srivastava. Since then, there have been several collaborations, including a play about the Hindi poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan in 2004. “It was staged in Allahabad, and in other towns where she lived. We had one show in Delhi too – but how many people in Delhi are interested in the lives of Hindi poets?” asked Srivastava.

The question is not merely rhetorical, but it doesn’t seem to have prevented Srivastava and Raina from taking on the challenge of staging Dwivedi’s highly poetic masterwork, which also purports to be the autobiography of the classical Sanskrit poet Banabhatta. Interpreting Banabhatta ki Atmakatha for a contemporary audience is no easy task, for the text demands not one but two leaps in time. First, it has to be approached as a text pre-occupied with the task of nation-building – Dwivedi wrote it in 1946, very much in the context of approaching independence. And second, it has to be read as a historico-philosophical take on the socio-religious tussles that characterised North Indian society in the seventh century AD, when the historical Banabhatta lived.

Banabhatta was the court poet of King Harshavardhana, who rose to power in North India after the decline of the Gupta Empire, ruling from Kannauj and Thanesar (now a small town in Haryana). In fact, Banabhatta’s lyrical-but-florid Sanskrit biography of the emperor, Harshacharita, is one of the primary historical sources for the period. And Banabhatta’s Kadambari, credited with being one of the first novels ever written, is so iconic of novel-ness that, Srivastava says, “Maharashtra mein novel ko upanyas nahi, kadambari ke naam se jaana jaata hai.”

Banabhatta, however, wrote no autobiography. Dwivedi’s novel is an entirely fictional account of a few months in his life. We do know that the poet’s parents died early, and that he left home when he was fairly young. It took Dwivedi’s leap of imagination, however, to make the young Bana a vagabond. “Dwivedi’s Banabhatta is a tramp. He runs a theatre troupe in Ujjayani, he becomes a fake sadhu and then an astrologer,” said Srivastava.

The play opens with Bana’s arrival in Thanesar, where he runs into Nipunika, a low-born woman who once acted in his troupe and used to be in love with him. Nipunika persuades Bana to help her rescue a princess named Bhattini, who is being held captive by one of the smaller chieftains of the area. Then begins a long journey through the Gangetic plain, punctuated by encounters with religious and political figures: Buddhist monks from a nearby vihara, Brahmins, Vaishnavs, tantriks, aghoris. For Raina, the text has many “anti-Brahminical beliefs” embedded in it. “In one scene, Bana hides something in an aghori Bhairav shrine, and the aghoris catch him. And they tell him, ‘tumhare shastra tumhe paakhand sikhaate hain’. No wonder, when this novel was released, the Brahmins of Banaras were up in arms,” laughed Raina.

And yet the novel is deeply imbued with allegories, many of which emerge from Hindu mythology. “Bhattini is an allegory of Sita, and of the mother goddess. She is kidnapped and unlawfully imprisoned, and when she emerges into the open, it is really as if she has emerged from the belly of the earth,” mused Raina. “And she worships Varaha, Vishnu’s boar avatar, who saved the earth by going down himself.” Varaha is also symbolic of the need to save the nation through sacrifice – as Srivastava put it, “to bring it out of the daldal (quicksand).”

The play promises to be interesting in terms of stage design. “I’m using the classical Sanskrit stage, which is minimal. The stage is divided into two parts, the front portion or Rangshish, and the slightly raised back portion, or Rangpith. And two doors, through which the actors enter and leave. That’s it,” said Raina.

The other striking thing about the play is its strong female characters and their engagement with each other. “The bond between the low-caste Nipunika and the noble-born Bhattini is based on Bhattini’s experience of having been kidnapped,” said Raina. Srivastava elaborated, “At one point, Bhattini says the whole country is searching for the missing daughter of Tuvar Milind because she is a princess. But no one thinks of the fact that all the dasis working in these rajmahals are also someone’s missing daughters.”

Published in Time Out Delhi Issue 9 Friday, July 25, 2008

A man in full: Maulana Azad

Published in the theatre pages of Time Out Delhi, 2007.

M Sayeed Alam’s Maulana Azad looks at the man behind the freedom fighter icon, says Trisha Gupta.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was a great Indian nationalist, but he smoked only Turkish cigarettes and drank only Chinese tea. “Despite being nationalist to the core, there were some Hindustani things that he hated – Hindustani doodh wali chai, yeh jo patti hoti hai, like dust; cigarettes, Hindustani oil and scent,” revealed M Sayeed Alam, writer and director of a play about Maulana Azad, which returns to Delhi this fortnight. “These are the things that make the play entertaining, and they are not of academic interest. Ab woh uthte kaise the, baithte kaise the, baatein kaise karte the, chaar baje uthte the ki teen baje uth jaate thhe, this no book will tell you,” Alam said.

An academic historian writing about Maulana Azad might mention that he smoked a lot of cigarettes, but it takes many conversations with people who knew him to find out which brand of cigarettes it was. Alam managed to track down a few such people – Aruna Asaf Ali, fellow-Congress party member and wife of the barrister Asaf Ali, Hasan Sani Nizami, whose father Khwaja Hasan Nizami had been a great friend of Maulana Azad’s, and finally, Ausaf Ali, who had worked with Maulana in the ’50s as a young journalist. It was Ausaf Ali who told Alam that Maulana’s brand of cigarettes was a Turkish one called Abdullah. And that he always drank the highest quality white jasmine tea.

Alam’s research for the play stretched over some five years, but during that time he had a day-job and was also working on a PhD. It was in a burst of enthusiasm over ten days in 2002 that he actually wrote out the script from beginning to end. His search for the private Maulana was aided by an Urdu biography written by Abdul Razzaq Malihabadi, who had been Maulana’s personal secretary for many years. Alam was clear from the beginning that writing a dramatic monologue in the voice of Maulana Azad was completely different from writing a play about his place in history. He wanted to answer the question, “Who was Maulana?” with something more than the usual trite clichés, like “a great freedom fighter” or “one of the main colleagues of Gandhiji, the fourth name after Gandhi, Nehru and Patel”.

The main source for Azad’s own take on his life and times was, of course, his autobiography, India Wins Freedom. But Alam wasn’t satisfied with simply using this account as the basis of the play. “This book is a huge disappointment for a reader who has read Maulana in Urdu. Maulana was a great writer. He had a command over history, over literature, over politics. In his newspapers, Al-Hilal and Inquilab, woh in cheezon ke bare mein bahut khubsoorat tareeke se likhte thhe.” Since that felicitous turn of phrase, or indeed any sign of the engaging conversationalist described by Aruna Asaf Ali, was completely missing from India Wins Freedom, Alam decided to construct the play not as an oral version of the autobiography, but as a series of conversations that Maulana has with Humayun Kabir the poet, his friend and one-time secretary.

This allowed Alam to do two things – one, to be historically accurate in his choice of language (it is known that Maulana actually dictated to Kabir in Urdu, and Kabir transcribed his words in English), and two, to return to Maulana something of the erudite, anecdotal quality that he had when speaking Urdu.

Urdu may have been Alam’s reason for casting Tom Alter, who he believes has done “a brilliant job”, but Azad’s own relationship with the language was more complex than we might imagine. His family of Muslim theologians and scholars had moved to Mecca soon after 1857, and he himself was born there, to an Arab mother.

When he was five, his family returned to India, but his education in Persian and Arabic as well as his family background meant that he always thought of Arabic as his mother tongue. But in India, writing in Arabic or Persian meant isolating yourself from the very possibility of a readership. “The status of Urdu in those days was like that of Hindi today. It may not have been seen as the highest language, but it had readers,” said Alam. It was a similar desire for readers, this time for an international audience, that Alam believes made Azad publish his autobiography in English. (In the book, and therefore in the play, however, it is Kabir who suggests that he write the book in English.)

Maulana may have made tactical compromises on the question of the language he wrote in, but in other matters, he stuck to a position once he had taken it. The greatest example of this was his principled and firm opposition to Partition, which makes up some part of the play. “You have a right over the whole country, and you want to claim only one corner of it? And then too, you want to claim an area where you are already a majority?”, he once said in a rhetorical query to Muslims who supported the League’s claim for Pakistan. He foresaw the splitting of East Pakistan into two countries, and predicted that Hindu-Muslim riots would not end with Partition, that they would in fact resume on a greater scale.

“He was prescient in both regards,” Alam said. “But I am not here to make judgements. Mine is a retelling of history, but interspersed with poetry, wisdom, anecdotes – all those things that make up Maulana, the man.”

Published in Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 4, June 1 - 14, 2007.

Hitting the right note: Hungry Heart Festival 2007

The third Hungry Heart Festival promises to be a naach-gaana affair, says Trisha Gupta.

First held in 2005, the Hungry Heart Festival has grown to be a permanent fixture on the Delhi calendar. The Hungry Heart Society was established in 2005 by three Delhi-based women: Sohaila Kapur, Smita Bharti and Monica Bhasin. “Smita and I are the writer-directors and actors, while Monica handles the production and finance side,” says Sohaila Kapur. “We thought we could bring our skills together and give Delhi a different sort of theatrical experience.”

“People in Delhi only go [to watch plays] where they can have a laugh,” Kapur says. She sounds matter-of-fact, but it’s clear that Kapur and her colleagues see their festival as a platform for theatre that deals sensitively with contemporary issues, with a special emphasis on portraying “women of substance and influence”. The first Hungry Heart festival took “women in relationships” as its theme and featured Anuradha Kapur’s powerful production of Antigone (starring Seema Biswas) as well as Deepti Naval’s first public recitation of her poetry.

While usually engaging with contemporary subjects that resonate with her urban middle class Indian audience, Kapur’s own plays are not necessarily “serious”. In fact, the festival’s second instalment in 2006 had “comedy” as a theme and featured five plays, all directed by Kapur herself.

This year’s theme is simply “musicals”. The festival opens with Naya Theatre’s production of Agra Bazar. Drawing on the consciously plebeian poetry of eighteenth- century Urdu poet Nazir Akbarabadi, the play was written by veteran director Habib Tanvir soon after he moved to Delhi in 1954. It was originally performed with non-professional actors from Okhla. Later, Tanvir reworked the play in the Chattisgarhi nacha folk style – which he continues to work in – with actors from the region. According to critic Javed Malick, what was revolutionary about the play was that it put on the stage “not the socially and architecturally walled-in space of a private dwelling, but a bazaar, with all its noise and bustle… its sharp social, economic and cultural polarities”.

The huge scale and infectious energy of Agra Bazar makes it a tough act to follow. But the festival has at least two other grand productions. First performed in 2003, Ashley Lobo’s dance theatre production About Nothing uses jazz, kathak, salsa and Western contemporary dance to mull over questions of relationships, violence and respect. Usman Peerzada’s Pathay Khan is a nautanki-style play performed by over 30 Pakistani actors and dancers. Peerzada is also bringing with him the famous Sufi singer Sain Zahoor. Kapur’s own play, Rumi: Unveil the Sun, about the Sufi poet Rumi and Shams Tabrizi, incorporates kathak and qawwali.

The other productions are on a less spectacular scale. Smita Bharti’s The Nun and the Prostitute is a humorous look at reality television and contemporary notions of morality. Finally, there’s Meeta Vasisht’s performance as the legendary Kashmiri mystic poet Lal Ded. (See page 18.)

These last three are directed by women, in keeping with one of Hungry Heart’s original objectives. “Lal Ded premiered at Hungry Heart in 2005, and I’m glad to bring it back,” says Vasisht. “The festival is personally dear to me because it’s run by these wonderful women.”

Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 2. April 20 - May 3, 2007.

Back to the future: Mohan Maharishi's Vidyottama

Time has always played the lead in Mohan Maharishi’s work, says Trisha Gupta, and it’s true of his latest as well.

Playwright-director Mohan Maharishi’s new play, Vidyottama, came out of a chance conversation. Maharishi was sitting around chatting with a few friends, when the conversation turned to the legendary Sanskrit poet and playwright Kalidas. “How do we know whether someone called Kalidas produced these works? Suppose his wife wrote and he took the credit?” someone asked. A remark made half in jest, perhaps, but Maharishi was intrigued enough to return to some of Kalidas’s most famous works – Abhigyan Shakuntalam, Meghadootam and Kumarasambhava. “I went through these texts again, and felt that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a woman to have imagined female beauty in the way it is described in them,” says Maharishi, who spent two decades in Chandigarh as head of Punjab University’s Department of Theatre. However, he found himself increasingly arrested by the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fictive figure of Kalidas’s wife, Vidyottama. “It is believed that Kalidas married the daughter of King Vikramaditya, whose name was either Vidyavati or Vidyottama. But there is very little historical detail available. We are not even clear whether this was Vikramaditya I or II. The tikakas, the commentators who came after him, talked only about his work, not his life. Perhaps it was not fashionable then to talk about a writer’s life,” suggests Maharishi. The lack of biographical certainty, though, gave Maharishi the liberty to more or less create his own characters – something that might otherwise have been much harder. “I have imagined Vidyottama as a very intelligent woman and a brilliant classical dancer. She is also a Cassandra-like figure – she has a boon from Shiva that allows her to see into the future. In fact, to travel to a different time. She disappears for days at a time. And she raises questions that no one else does,” says Maharishi. At one point in Maharishi’s play, Vidyottama asks Kalidas why there are no evil Brahmans in his writings. How is that possible, says Kalidas, my audience will reject me. “Oh,” retorts Vidyottama, “So you admit that to survive, you have to believe whatever your audience believes?” For Maharishi, the play has been a chance to think aloud about the difference between classical art and modern forms of creative expression. “In the classical view of things, raising social issues was not considered the function of art.”  And yet, Maharishi believes that Kalidas’s works exhibit a sense of “connection… with the cosmos” that could not have been created by a writer “completely isolated from the outside world”. It is the figure of Vidyottama who becomes, in Maharishi’s eyes, both Kalidas’s source of inspiration and energy, and the force that threatens to rupture his blissful world. In the play, Kalidas, attempting to write the scene where Shakuntala makes her way to King Dushyant’s court, asks his wife how she would react if her husband returned to his old life and refused to recognise her. “Gali deti,” says the straight-talking Vidyottama. Maharishi thus creates a very contemporary back-story for a famous classical scene. “This scene has perhaps the strongest language ever used by Kalidas, where Shakuntala calls Dushyant ‘anarya’ – one who is not an Arya,” he points out. Kalidas is unhappy with Vidyottama’s criticisms, or her freedom-loving nature, but he can’t do without her. The climactic event in the play is a journey that Vidyottama makes into the future. “She goes somewhere, imaginatively, intellectually or physically – and returns violated. She finds the future so ferocious and violent that she comes back sick. The clash between the past and the present is borne by Vidyottama, on her body,” explains Maharishi. The current play brings together many of Maharishi’s previous interests. He has been exploring the idea of time since he wrote his most famous play, Einstein, in 1994. “Time is as still as this door, this wall behind us,” he says quietly. “This idea that time moves is a very limited concept. Einstein understood that. But we persist in thinking that we have a past and a future… In fact, all time is always present.” Is that why his approach to the “present” is always routed through the past? “I do not wish to be topical, to write about something that will come and go. So I look for symbols. I have always been concerned with the present. But the past is my interest because it refuses to go away. It persists.”

Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 1. April 6-19 2007