Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture

Theatre and the World

WHAT ARE THE ETHICS OF POST-COLONIAL REPRESENTATION? In this passionate and controversial work, director and critic Rustom Bharucha presents the first major critique of intercultural theatre from a ‘Third World’ perspective. Bharucha questions the assumptions underlying the theatrical visions of some of the twentieth century’s most prominent theatre practitioners and theorists, including Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook. He contends that Indian theatre has been grossly mythologized and taken out of context by Western directors and critics. He presents a detailed dramaturgical analysis of what he describes as an intracultural theatre project, providing an alternative vision of the possibilities of cultural pluralism. Theatre and the World bravely challenges much of today’s ‘multicultural’ theatre movement. It will be vital reading for anyone interested in the creation or discussion of a non-Eurocentric world theatre. Rustom Bharucha is a writer, director and dramaturg, currently living and working in India. He has written extensively on indigenous theatres and the politics of interculturalism. His works include Rehearsals of Revolution (1983), The Theatre of Kanhailal (1992), and a monograph entitled ‘The Question of Faith’ (1992).

Theatre and the World Performance and the politics of culture

Rustom Bharucha

London and New York

First published 1990 by Manohar Publications, India This edition first published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1990, 1993 Rustom Bharucha All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bharucha, Rustom Theatre and the world: performance and the politics of culture / Rustom Bharucha. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Theater-India. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Kroetz, Franz Xaver, 1946–Wunschkonzert. I. Title. PN2881.5.B46 1993 792’.0954–dc20 93–18374 ISBN 0-203-168178 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-263340 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-09215-9 (Print Edition) 0-415-09216-7 (pbk)

I do not want my home to be walled in on all sides and its windows to be stuffed. I want cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. —Mahatma Gandhi

Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

Part I Points of departure 1

Collision of cultures: some western interpretations and uses of the Indian theatre

13

2

Goodbye Grotowski

43

3

The theatre of migrants

55

4

Peter Brook’s Mahabharata: a view from India

69

Part II Transition 5

The Request Concert project: foreword

91

6

Request Concert in Calcutta

95

7

Request Concert in Bombay

113

8

Request Concert in Madras

129

9

Retrospect

151

Part III Returning 10

Preparing for Krishna

167

11

Notes on the invention of tradition

193

12

Letter to an actress

213

13

Ninasam: a cultural alternative

223

Afterword

243

Index

255

vi

Preface

History has intervened decisively since the writing of these essays on interculturalism in the theatre between 1981 and 1989. But with critical hindsight, one could also say that the more things change, the more they seem to remain exactly (or more or less) where they were. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In this context, it is worth pointing out that my critique of ‘cultural colonialism’, ‘ethnocentricity’ and the indifference to the ethics of representation in intercultural transactions seems more valid to me now in the aftermath of the Cold War than earlier when I wrote these essays in a spirit of liberal dissent. ‘Globalization’ has become a major force in India today, particularly in the context of the new economic policies instituted by the Indian government on the ‘recommendations’ of the World Bank and the IMF. The widespread intervention of the cable networks is merely part of this ‘globalization’, affirming an increasingly homogenized image of ‘the world’ that has yet to receive an adequate critical discourse in India. In contrast, my focus on theatre rather than the media in this book might seem to be almost marginal in relation to the violence being inflicted in the name of a ‘new world order’. But within the limited context of my theatrical journey in different cultures, I do point out the levels of appropriation that are at work in the seemingly altruistic process of intercultural exchange: appropriations that are not just imposed but negotiated with increasingly covert simplicities between and within systems of power. If there has been a time-lag in the publication of my book, this has to be related to the larger production of critical discourse in the West. Like the phenomenon of interculturalism itself, the discourse on the subject has been overwhelmingly dominated (if not monopolized) by western theorists and practitioners. My book in its own way is an attempt not to provide a more ‘balanced’ view on the subject, but simply another view, another voice responsive to the particular contradictions of a post-colonial history in which interculturalism is not an issue but a burning reality. Indeed, I am at once amused and pained by the neutralization of ‘reality’ in much recent intercultural theory, which I address in an Afterword specially written for this book, in which I also provide an update of my theatrical journey

viii

in an intracultural (rather than intercultural) context. Apart from this addendum to the text, I have consciously avoided ‘refining’ the essays in the book, preferring to allow the angularists, bumps and ruptures in my critical discourse to represent my position, instead of allowing it to be subsumed within the sequestered confines of a ‘coherent’ theory. I am more convinced now than when I wrote this book that it is both premature and somewhat presumptious to assume that a theory of interculturalism can be written at this point in time. From whose point of view do we see this scenario of colliding cultures? Instead of ‘exchanging civilities’, to use Patrice Pavis’s phrase, on the intricate process of transporting, translating and ‘restoring’ behaviours of different cultures and body-languages, it would be much more useful, I think, to exchange differences not just about ‘theatre’ but about where we see ourselves in ‘the world’. A valid theory of interculturalism can be initiated only through a respect for individual histories out of which a ‘world’ can be imagined in which the colliding visions of theatre can meet. Calcutta September 1992

Acknowledgements

This collection of essays could be described as a theatrical journey. It has involved much travel in different parts of the world. For the original edition of the book, published by Manohar Publications in New Delhi, the earliest essays were written between 1981 and 1984 while I was teaching in New York. The writing on Request Concert synchronized with productions of the play staged in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Jakarta and Tokyo during 1986–7. The short section on the production in West Germany was written after the play was staged at the Norddeutsche Dance Theatre Festival in May 1988. All the other essays were written in India, where I am now permanently based. For this current edition, substantially revised and with new material added, the revisions were made during 1992. Journeys in theatre are rarely smooth. The obstacles, accidents and detours that one encounters along the way can be circumvented only through the support of one’s fellow travellers. Looking back on my numerous encounters in theatres and streets, hotels and homes, airports and train stations, I realize how much of my writing has been shaped by these seemingly tangential meetings with strangers, many of whom are now my associates and friends. Even those who passed on to unknown destinations have inspired this book in various ways, and I remember them as well. More specifically, I would like to thank Manuel Lutgenhorst, who was my collaborator on the Request Concert project along with Usha Ganguly, Sulabha Deshpande and Chandralekha, who acted in the Indian productions. Another close associate has been the inspired actress, teacher and correspondent, Alaknanda Samarth, whose confrontation of the self has been at once disturbing and enlightening. To Anuradha Kapur I owe my thanks for many hours of discussion on ‘representation’ and ‘voice’. Her generous hospitality has provided me with a base in New Delhi. Yet another ‘home’ to which I have retreated for bouts of writing has been Dhvanyaloka, a writing centre administered by Professor C.D.Narasimhaiah, a most generous host. Equally warm has been my association with Sri L.S. Rajagopalan, who guided my research on Krishnattam. I am grateful to him for introducing me to Sri P.C.C. Elayath, the superintendent of the Krishnattam troupe, who in turn looked after me in Guruvayur. Yet another supporter of my

x

work has been Sri K.V.Subbanna, the modest visionary (as I like to describe him) of the grassroots cultural organization, Ninasam. It has been my privilege to teach and direct in this very special place. Grants for some of my travel and research expenses were made available through the Max Mueller Bhavan, the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium. Along with this financial support which I gratefully acknowledge, I would like to thank all the editors who have published my essays, particularly those who have encouraged me to affirm my position without compromising on my voice. I am particularly grateful to Talia Rodgers of Routledge for her perceptive support of my work. Her respect for my position has been very real and immediate to me despite our long-distance correspondence. The opening essay of the book ‘Collision of cultures: some western interpretations and uses of the Indian theatre’ is a substantially revised version of an essay that originally appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1984. It was reprinted in the India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3, September 1984, and the NCPA Quarterly Journal, Vol. XIV, No. 2, June 1985. ‘Peter Brook’s Mahabharata: a view from India’ first appeared in Theater, Vol. XIX, No. 2, Spring 1988. It was reprinted in Framework, Vol. 35, 1988. A shorter version of the essay was also published in the Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXIII, No. 32, and the essay was reprinted with minor changes in David Williams (ed.), Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 1991. It has been edited and brought up to date for this volume. All three essays on Request Concert in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras appeared in New Theatre Quarterly in three consecutive issues—Vol. 11, August, 1987; Vol. 12, November 1987; Vol. 13, February, 1988. The essay on the Calcutta production was serialized in The Statesman Miscellany on July 3 and July 10, 1988. ‘Letter to an actress’ appeared in Framework, Vol. 35, 1988. ‘Preparing for Krishna’ was published by the Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 16, January-March 1988. ‘Notes on the invention of tradition’ and ‘Ninasam: a cultural alternative’ appeared in issues of the Economic and Political Weekly on August 19, 1989, and June 30, 1990. To all these supporters of my writing, I reiterate my thanks. It now remains for me to acknowledge the support that I have received from my mother. Steeped in common sense and love, her criticism has never failed to surprise me.

Introduction

There is a new ‘ism’ in the theatre today that needs to be strongly questioned. Substituting, however nebulously, the older category of internationalism, interculturism is opening up new possibilities of relationships between cultures that seem to transcend the specificities of history, race, language and time. At one level, it is a direct response to our steadily shrinking world, where geographical and national boundaries, which formerly segregated cultures, have been called into question through international transport and the exchange of information. Our world is smaller today and infinitely more accessible (at least, for those who can afford to travel by air). There is less need to imagine ‘other’ cultures through travel accounts and translations of texts because now it is possible to experience directly these cultures, insofar as tourism permits us to do so. Telecommunications, satellite systems, multinational corporations and computers are part of a world-unifying order of which interculturalism in the theatre is merely a symptom. Instead of embracing this cultural phenomenon of our times, I have felt the need in this book to question the validity of interculturalism with particular reference to the Indian theatre. Essentially—and there is no other way that I can state my position—the interpretation and use of cultures have to be confronted within the particularities of a specific historical condition. It is naive, if not irresponsible, to assume that a meaningful confrontation of any culture can transcend the immediacies of its history. As an Indian who grew up in postindependence India, exposed as I was to the remnants and contradictions of colonialism, inspired by and yet resistant to my predominantly western education, I can perceive the intricacies and lure of interculturalism only from within my own historical space. I think it should be acknowledged that the implications of interculturalism are very different for people in impoverished, ‘developing’ countries like India, and for their counterparts in technologically advanced, capitalist societies like America, where interculturalism has been more strongly promoted both as a philosophy and a business. In the case of India, the exposure to ‘other’ cultures has not always been a matter of choice. Colonialism, one might say, does not operate through principles of ‘exchange’. Rather, it appropriates, decontextualizes, and represents

2 INTRODUCTION

the ‘other’ culture, often with the complicity of its colonized subjects. It legitimates its authority only by asserting its cultural superiority. Though this colonization of cultures is undeniably complex, insofar as colonial models are not merely imposed but assimilated, it is undeniably different in its orientation from the exposure to cultures that the American avantgarde experienced during the 1960s. At this time, there was obviously no political imposition on the American people to absorb other cultures; they were free to pursue their ‘cultures of choice’. Whether one views this fascination for predominantly non-western cultures as part of a general curiosity for the exotic, or as a perpetuation and consolidation of ‘orientalism’, would depend on one’s political position and place in history. For my own part, I believe that as much as one would like to accept the seeming openness of Euro-American interculturalists to other cultures, the larger economic and political domination of the West has clearly constrained, if not negated the possibilities of a genuine exchange. In the best of all possible worlds, interculturalism could be viewed as a ‘two-way street’, based on a mutual reciprocity of needs. But in actuality, where it is the West that extends its domination to cultural matters, this ‘two-way street’ could be more accurately described as a ‘dead-end’. I begin my confrontation of interculturalism by providing a critical scenario of its development in the Euro-American theatre of this century. As far as possible, I have concentrated on those artists who have been actively involved in experiencing, adapting, transporting and manufacturing performance traditions from the East. To narrow the focus of my investigation, I am concerned specifically with Euro-American uses and constructions of the Indian theatre. It would be presumptuous, if not self-defeating on my part, to provide a critique of interculturalism by attempting to speak for all the performance traditions in the East. Not only do I lack the knowledge to undertake this ambitious enterprise (despite my exposure to Indonesian, Korean and Japanese theatre cultures), I believe it is imperative to resist any attempt to subsume performance traditions of the East within amorphous categories like the ‘oriental theatre’ (envisioned by Antonin Artaud in the early 1930s), or the strictures of performance theories provided by interculturalists like Richard Schechner. A critique of interculturalism must necessarily focus on specific cultures and the diverse ways in which they are seen and used. Though the Euro-American interculturalists discussed in the first part of the book share many assumptions of the East, often unconsciously ethnocentric, it would be wrong on my part to deny the particularities of their visions. In Gordon Craig, for instance, one sees how his tacit refusal to confront the Indian theatre directly, despite the recommendations of Ananda Coomaraswamy, merely reinforced his mythologies of the ‘holy East’. Distance, in his case, was directly related to a certain fear he felt for the ‘exquisite fluting of the great and lovely Krishna’, which he believed could be an essentially negative influence on the European artist. Along with this

INTRODUCTION 3

fear, however, there was also a suggestion of cultural deference in Craig’s attitude to the East, which he apotheosized with unabashed fervour. In contrast, Grotowski’s use of Yoga and Kathakali exercises in his Theatre Laboratory was entirely pragmatic and non-reverential. He used Indian techniques so long as he needed them, before turning to a more direct confrontation of the psycho-physical resources of his actors. So long as he did theatre, Grotowski’s interculturalism was perfectly conditioned by his own needs and philosophy, but once he abandoned theatre in favour of para-theatrical explorations, his interculturalism received new, more mystical manifestations in projects like the Theatre of Sources. In these meetings between strangers from different parts of the world, Grotowski explored the ‘sources’ that underline the ‘techniques of sources’ to be found in different cultures. As I examine in my essay ‘Goodbye Grotowski’, his search became primal, almost pre-cultural as he attempted to establish a communion between human beings that could transcend the specificities of history and culture. It was through Eugenio Barba that Grotowski was first exposed to Kathakali, after Barba’s significant visit to the Kalamandalam in Kerala in 1963. Now based at the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in Holstebro, Denmark, Barba heads one of the most advanced research centres in ‘theatre anthropology’, where the ‘extra daily’ principles of the body embedded in Indian performance traditions like Odissi, Bharat Natyam, Kathakali, have been related to ‘transcultural’ principles of the body from different performance traditions in the world. In my essay ‘The Theatre of Migrants’, I examine how Barba’s interculturalism is, at once, scientific, preoccupied as it is with laws and principles relating to ‘energy’ and ‘pre-expressivity’, but it is also more immediate in its active exploration of theatrical ‘barters’ with different communities, ranging from peasants in Sicilian villages to prisoners in Peru. The celebration of interculturalism is, perhaps, most blatant in the writings of Richard Schechner, whose representation of non-western cultures has stimulated much of the oppositional energy to be found in this book. From my principal essay ‘Collision of Cultures’, I hope it will become clear to the reader that religious festivals like the Ramlila cannot be subsumed within the post-modern categories of thought adopted by Schechner in his performance theory. For all its play and ambivalence, this theory upholds a methodology and a vision of the world that must be termed ethnocentric. Apart from decontextualizing ‘ritual actions’ from their larger structures (and thereby, neutralizing their meanings), Schechner seems more eager to synthesize underlying patterns of structure/ process in differing performance traditions rather than to confront their individual histories. This eclecticism is almost as problematic as his advocacy of ‘cultural tourism’ which tends to be examined on a purely technical level as a generator of new performances, rather than as an instance of the cultural exploitation of nonwestern people. I should emphasize that my critique of western (mis)uses of the Indian theatre is not based solely on aesthetic criteria. What concerns me is the ethics of

4 INTRODUCTION

representation underlying any cross-cultural exchange, and the social relationships that constitute it. It is these relationships (more often than not ignored in theatre criticism) that provide the underlying thrust to my examination of Peter Brook’s production of the Mahabharata. Not only does the production, in my view, blatantly trivialize Indian culture in its nine-hour encapsulation of the epic, and reduction of Hindu philosophy to platitudes, it upholds a Eurocentric structure of action and performance that has been specifically designed for international audiences. Brook’s appropriation of epic material, I believe, is linked to his affiliations within a system of power that have made India increasingly visible (and economically viable) in the international market. In all the examinations of specific artists considered in the first part of the book, there are obvious links in their attitudes to the East and assimilations of non-western material. These links, I hope, will become clear to the reader within the individual contexts of their intercultural work. One general observation that needs to be pointed out here is that none of the artists mentioned above—who represent, I might add, the most outstanding figures in the Euro-American theatre today—has turned to India out of the faintest concern for its present sociocultural condition. Rather, they have been drawn almost exclusively to our ‘traditional’ sources. What has happened to the Indian theatre since Independence, or for that matter, since Herasim Lebedeff, a Russian adventurer, initiated the ‘modern Indian theatre’ with two Bengali adaptations of European farces in the late eighteenth century, seems to be of no interest to interculturalists. Nor are they concerned with the assimilation of colonial models like the proscenium theatre, which have been totally transformed in the company-theatre tradition that flourished in all parts of India, primarily in the early decades of this century. Our history is apparently of no concern to Euro-American interculturalists. It is our ‘tradition’, our much glorified ‘past’, to which they have turned to find revelations (if they happen to be mystical), or to extract material (like the Bhagavad Gita, which served as the libretto for Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, not to mention the Mahabharata, which provided Brook with a ‘story’). Last but not least, India has provided interculturalists with a wide range of techniques including Yoga, the mudras and eye-exercises of Kathakali, and more recently, the martial arts techniques of Kalaripayattu. Even those theorists who have not regarded ‘tradition’ in India as an immutable point of reference have invariably failed to contextualize Indian performance traditions within the minutiae of their ever-changing histories. I cannot deny that this dominant tendency to dehistoricize Indian culture is the source of my discomfort with most intercultural theories of the Indian theatre. It is bad enough when a text like Shakuntala (the source of so many myths of Indian grace, wisdom, romance) is decontextualized from its aesthetic and social context, but it is worse when a traditional performance is stripped of its links to the lives of the people for whom it is performed. Nothing could be more

INTRODUCTION 5

disrespectful to theatre than to reduce its act of celebration to a repository of techniques and theories. It is the worldliness of theatre that interculturalists have tacitly, and even resolutely, ignored. The polemic raised in the first part of the book is a direct response to this lack of concern for the contextual realities permeating the Indian theatre, and its dynamic relationships with numerous communities. Before theorizing about any performance tradition, I believe it is necessary to question what it could mean to its own people for whom it exists in the first place. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be a priority for most interculturalists, who are more concerned with strengthening their own visions rather than representing other cultures in their own contexts. Unable to find valid principles of work in Euro-American theories of interculturalism, I was compelled to search for alternatives in my own theatre work. The second part of this book could be read as a creative rebuttal of the ideas raised in the first part. Instead of countering intercultural theories with another theory, I have preferred to provide an alternative through a documentation of my own intercultural research. If the first part of the book is entitled ‘Points of Departure’, the second part could be most appropriately described as ‘Transition’ in which I test my ideas of interculturalism through the exploration of a specific theatre project About six years ago, while I was in the process of writing about interculturalism, I embarked on a theatre journey with the German designer and director, Manuel Lutgenhorst. Together, we resolved to adapt and stage a onewoman, wordless play entitled Request Concert by Franz Xaver Kroetz, in five Asian cities. Our purpose was to situate the German text within the cultural contexts and actual living conditions to be found in different parts of Asia. Since the play focuses on the everyday life of a working woman and her household routine on one particular evening, involving cooking, eating, watching television, listening to the radio and stitching, it lends itself to the most detailed examination of everyday actions and gestures, which vary considerably in different socio-cultural contexts. An additional complexity is provided in the final action of this non-eventful play, when the woman commits suicide with a matter-of-face calm. Unavoidably, we were compelled to question the validity of this action within the social contexts of Asian women and their connections to the larger movements of feminism in the world today. It was by focusing on the specific worlds of individual Asian women that we were able to explore the intercultural possibilities of Kroetz’s text. I believe that this may be the first time that any such theatre project has been undertaken, where the process of theatrical adaptation has extended to a detailed analysis of the social processes determining everyday life in other cultures. Two additional factors contributed, I believe, to the importance of the project. One included our decision to explore different systems of gesture. Though Kroetz’s play appears to be ‘realistic’, we found that its minutiae could be concretized not only through Indian adaptations of ‘naturalism’, but also through

6 INTRODUCTION

the more rarefied vocabulary of the classical dance tradition of Bharat Natyam. This may be the first intercultural experiment where a ‘traditional’ idiom of performance has been used not merely to explore a ‘contemporary’ theme but a dramatic text in which the structures of a mechanized society are questioned through possibilities of resistance. Yet another meaningful aspect of our project concerned the working relationship established between the individual actresses and Lutgenhorst and myself. One of the challenges in intercultural experiments is to find a method of work that reflects larger principles of ‘exchange’. In this regard, the dynamics of power embodied in the director-actor relationship pose problems in any tradition, particularly since it is men who invariably direct women. But the situation is even more delicate, I believe, when one directs actors from another culture in a play that ostensibly reflects their lives. In our intercultural theatre project, the problems of power were greatly subverted through the actresses, who were also the co-directors of the productions. Together we contributed to our mutual learning process. In the second part of this book, ‘Transition’, I provide a detailed retrospective of the process of investigating Request Concert within the cultural contexts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It is not just the technical challenge of finding substitutions, deletions, transformations and additions for the details in Kroetz’s text that concerns me, but the attitudes of the individual actresses to their own societies. Significantly, the problematic decision concerning suicide in the play was challenged in radical ways, but I shall leave you to read about it in my descriptions of the productions. Though the Request Concert project extended to Indonesia, Korea and Japan, I focus in this book only on the Indian productions. This is because I was most directly involved in them, the productions serving to bring me back to my own country after an absence of seven years in the United States. While exploring the play in different contexts, I realized that I had no particular reason to work outside of India, where the differences in culture are considerable. Gestures, conventions, codes of cleanliness and decorum, eating habits, leisure, fantasies, modes of resistance…all these specificities are individually textured and concretized from region to region. I suppose one reason why I felt no need to continue the project outside of India (even though I worked on the production in Jakarta and travelled to Korea and Japan for initial explorations) is that the intracultural possibilities of exploring Indian culture seemed infinitely more meaningful to me. Therefore, from my initial thoughts and critical comments on interculturalism, the book gradually focuses on intracultural explorations in the Indian theatre. The third and the final section of the book, ‘Returning’, deals specifically with Indian theatres, both traditional and contemporary, in the larger context of the search for alternatives. ‘Returning’ opens with an extended description and analysis of Krishnattam, an eight-part dance-drama cycle of plays, performed in honour of Lord Krishna at the Guruvayur Temple. My purpose is not merely to

INTRODUCTION 7

document this performance, but to offer new possibilities of seeing ‘traditional theatre’, that are linked at once to the mutations of its history and the erotics of its performance. The history of ‘traditional theatre’ in India has been represented primarily by orientalists and pundits, whose aesthetic priorities tend to be shaped exclusively by textual rather than performative realities. Our Indian orientalists are, perhaps, more elitist than their western counterparts in hearkening back to Sanskrit sources, which are the ‘authentic’ points of reference for any discussion of Indian culture. These sources would be perfectly valid if they did not prevent the scholars from addressing Indian performances within their immediate social, political and cultural realities. Unfortunately, these realities are considered ‘unaesthetic’. Always in the process of changing, they unavoidably challenge sacrosanct and static views of ‘tradition’, where the past is an immutable and eternal point of reference. I need hardly add that the decontextualization of performances, which I address in the first part of the book, once again resurfaces as a problem, but in a different context. Now it is not interculturalists who are the focus of my attention, but a group of post-independence Indian artists and scholars who have ‘invented’ a ‘tradition’, based on principles of ‘authenticity’ and the search for ‘roots’. In a polemical essay on the ‘invention of tradition’ in the contemporary Indian theatre, I confront the cooption of tribal and rural performances within the predominantly urban genre of ‘folk theatre’. I also deal with the recent surfeit of spectacles promoting ‘festival culture’ in New Delhi and different parts of the world. The ‘system of power’ that I had confronted in relation to Brook’s production of the Mahabharata is reviewed within the contemporary Indian context. Today, ‘Indian culture’ is being reduced to a commodity by our own government and a new breed of bureaucrats, who have shaped, marketed and transported this ‘culture’ to different parts of the world. In contrast to this essentially decorative use of ‘tradition’ in the creation of political spectacles, I reflect on a recent attempt by the Indian actress, Alaknanda Samarth, to enact Kunti in an experimental production directed by Kumar Shahani. Though it may not have been successful by existing standards in the Indian media, and perhaps, even by its own expectations, I believe there was a serious attempt here to explore a contemporary idiom of Indian acting that used the underlying principles of abhinaya and classical Indian music. What is significant is that these principles were not merely imitated. Rather, they provided valid points of departure for a non-psychological, non-naturalistic, Indian idiom of acting. For any breakthroughs in forms or idioms of acting, I need hardly add that we need institutions where alternatives can be explored and sustained. Perhaps, even more than forms or idioms, we need structures of work where the everwidening schism between rural and urban cultures can be confronted. It is in this context that I end my book with a detailed case study of an exemplary cultural

8 INTRODUCTION

organization called Ninasam, which is situated in the village of Heggodu in Karnataka. Over the years, this grassroots organization has administered a theatre school and a repertory company that has performed the classics to thousands of villagers and small-town residents throughout Karnataka. It also runs a rural film society and a workshop unit that has explored creative interactions with underprivileged communities. Most notable of these ventures has been an adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in collaboration with the Siddhi tribe of African origin. This production must certainly rank as a significant intercultural encounter insofar as an African text was adapted into Kannada for a predominantly illiterate Indian tribe—the first venture of its kind in the Indian theatre. On a wider intercultural scale, Ninasam has screened the films of Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Resnais and Satyajit Ray to a wide range of Kannadaspeaking Indians. Its repertoire of plays includes Sanskrit and Kannada classics, along with the plays of Shakespeare, Brecht and even an adaptation of Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. These intercultural inputs would seem overly eclectic if one failed to confront the ways in which they have been adapted and represented to mass audiences. The focus of Ninasam’s work, one should not forget, is predominantly local. In its concrete embodiment of an essentially socialist vision—a socialism of actions rather than words—we find a stirring example of how cultures can be adapted and meaningfully projected to enhance the consciousness of people. In its decentralized, assertively ‘small’ structure, we find a conscious resistance not only to the cultural monoliths based in New Delhi, but to the larger ‘system of power’ that promotes cultures on the basis of political exigencies, fashion and the demands of the international market. From the ‘world’ of interculturalism to the ‘regions’ of intraculturalism to the ‘village’ of Heggodu, this book covers a definite trajectory from global concerns to local issues and problems. Heggodu is undeniably part of the larger world of computers, multinational corporations and post-modern performance theories, but it is also an alternative to this world in its seeming isolation and self-sufficiency. Here it is not techniques and theories of interculturalism that matter, but the context of people’s lives. One can only hope that Ninasam’s example will inspire other institutions in India to ‘serve’ people through our culture, making them aware of its integrative possibilities at a time when political solutions for our ‘national unity’ are not in sight. From the example of Ninasam, I have learned that the strongest resistance to cultural domination lies in creative work. Polemics have their limits, even though they may be necessary to question dominant discourses and power structures. In the first part of this book, I found that I needed to be polemical if only to free myself from affiliations to dominant structures of thought—the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of my education and cultural conditioning. But in the second part of the book, I move into a different mode of writing as I relive the process of Request Concert in three Indian cities. Here, as a dramaturg, I begin to enter the many worlds of

INTRODUCTION 9

India that coexist through a web of differences and infinitesimal links. Then, in the third part of the book, through my experience of Krishnattam in the Guruvayur Temple and the process of reflecting on Kunti in the contemporary Indian theatre, where tradition is ‘invented’ rather than lived, I end the book in Heggodu, where I have returned and will continue to return for more sustained and, I hope, formative work. My interculturalism has brought me home. And for that, I am truly grateful, even to those seeming opponents with whom I have been compelled to engage in polemical battles. My confrontation of their theories and uses of non-western cultures has necessitated criticism, but it has also compelled me to question my own assumptions of history and culture. Perhaps, it is this self-questioning that has prevented me from writing this book in one sustained narrative with an aura of objectivity and omniscience. Rather, I have been drawn to the infinitely flexible and intimate world of essays, which lend themselves to introspection and articulations of doubt. Some readers may be somewhat dismayed by the diverse ‘styles’ of these essays, which include autobiographical interventions, fictions, excerpts from a dramaturg’s log, invocations, switches between the first and third person, polemics and even a letter. All I can say is that these ‘styles’ were necessary for what I had to say. They enabled me to find my voice as a writer, where more academic essays with all their constraints and seeming ‘objectivity’ would have prevented me from representing myself. I should also add that I have been linked long enough to the western academic system to know that power-bound terms like ‘orientalism’ and ‘interculturalism’ cannot be subverted through the existing languages of criticism. At times, these languages may be appropriate to situate these terms in a history of ideas, but they cannot be used to express one’s fiindamental resistance to what they represent in our world. I have tried very consciously in this book to prevent my dissent from being subsumed within euphemistic categories of ‘protest’ (which constitute a form of intellectual cooption). Confronting the strategies of writing at particularly crucial points in my discourse, I have been compelled at times to be rude. I can only emphasize that this was not for effect or out of any particular need to be vindictive. The issues raised in this book are too important for personal rancour and academic feuds to dominate the discourse. All I have tried to do is to be true to my voice within the contradictions of my history. Undeniably, the struggle in this book to find my cultural bearings in the theatre has prevented me from writing a ‘theory’ of interculturalism. As a theatre worker, I must also admit that theories interest me much less than actions and the actual shaping of alternatives. I would be perfectly happy if my book could be read as a theatrical journey, beginning with ‘Points of Departure’, leading to ‘Transition’ and finally proceeding to a state of ‘Returning’, that continues. If this journey inspires more alternatives to dominant cultural systems on the lines of the Request Concert project and the grassroots

10 INTRODUCTION

activity of Ninasam, I, for one, would believe that writing about theatre is as rewarding as doing it. Theatre is neither a text nor a commodity. It is an activity that needs to be in ceaseless contact with the realities of the world and the inner necessities of our lives. If theatre changes the world, nothing could be better, but let us also admit that this has not happened so far. It would be wiser (and less euphoric) if we accepted that it is possible to change our own lives through theatre. I hope that this book in its own way will contribute not only to the transformative possibilities of our theatre, but also to the enrichment of the lives involved in it.

Part I Points of departure

12

Chapter 1 Collision of cultures Some western interpretations and uses of the Indian theatre

In this essay, I examine the phenomenon of interculturalism in the theatre by focusing on some western interpretations and uses of the Indian theatre. More specifically, I analyse exemplary attitudes to the Indian theatre demonstrated by artists as varied as Gordon Craig, Jerzy Grotowski and Richard Schechner. I should emphasize that I have not attempted to provide a comprehensive history of western perspectives on the Indian theatre. Nor do I offer any synoptic view of how the Indian theatre has been interpreted (and misinterpreted), used (and misused), mythologized (and demystified) in the West. I do not believe that there is an overriding western view of the Indian theatre that can be summarily categorized. Certainly, I do not discern any pervasive ‘orientalism’ in the attitudes of western theatre practitioners and theorists towards the Indian theatre, no systematized cultural imperialism that undermines the realities of Indian culture and life. At the same time, it would be disingenuous on my part to deny that instances of cultural imperialism do not exist. As I will clarify towards the end of this essay, the increased accessibility and use of the Indian theatre have occasionally resulted in a subtle exploitation of its traditions and conventions. I substantiate this view by examining the manipulation of ‘cultural’ tourism and the ambivalent ethics of cross-cultural borrowings, with particular reference to Richard Schechner’s writings on interculturalism and the use of ritual in theatre. In fact, it is Schechner who has been largely responsible for the propagation of ‘interculturalism’, both as a concept and a practice, much more so than Craig or Grotowski, who have merely confronted other cultures without systematizing their experiences. As we shall examine in this essay, Craig eventually distanced himself from the Indian theatre (and, in the process, mythologized it), while Grotowski worked more scientifically on specific Indian techniques before realizing that they could not be incorporated into his psycho-physical system of acting. In contrast, Schechner continues to ‘celebrate’ his interactions with other cultures, a phenomenon that was most explosive in the American theatre of the late 1960s. Recalling the ‘burst of experimental energy’ from the 1950s to around 1975, Schechner specifies:

14 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

A theatre that was genuinely intercultural drawing its techniques and examples from within the Euro-American culture area, and from without— from Africa, Asia, Native America, Micronesia: everywhere. People didn’t question too much whether or not this interculturalism— this affection for Kathakali exercises, the precision of Noh drama, the simultaneity and intensity of African dance—was a continuation of colonialism, a further exploitation of other cultures. There was something simply celebratory about discovering how diverse the world was, how many performance genres there were, and how we could enrich our own experience by borrowing, stealing, exchanging. (Schechner 1982, p.19) In this essay, I raise precisely those questions which were not confronted by the American avant-garde in relation to their ‘celebratory’ use of other cultures. This ‘use’ amounts, in my view, to a naive and unexamined ethnocentricity. Quite simply, I would like to show that borrowing, stealing and exchanging from other cultures is not necessarily an ‘enriching’ experience for the cultures themselves. Interculturalism can be liberating, but it can also be a ‘continuation of colonialism, a further exploitation of other cultures’ (ibid.). Before launching into a polemic (for which I must prepare my reader), it would be useful to recall one of the most inspired mythologizers of the ‘oriental theatre’—Antonin Artaud. Though he did not address the Indian theatre per se, his influence on intercultural trends in the Euro-American theatre cannot be ignored. Foreshadowing the counterculture of the 1960s, Artaud was drawn to a vast and bewildering range of cultural stimuli, including Yoga, oriental religions, drugs, magic, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, mysticism, acupuncture, astrology. In his eclectic, almost frantic need to absorb non-western cultures, he decontextualized their realities within the incandescence of his vision. The ‘oriental theatre’ was just one element that was ‘alchemized’ in his absorption of other cultures. Its specificities mattered less to him than its revelations. As Susan Sontag points out in her famous essay on Artaud, ‘The stimulus of the Balinese and Cambodian dances [which provided the basis for Artaud’s writings on the oriental theatre] could just as well have come from observing the theatre of a Dahomey tribe or the Shamanistic ceremonies of the Patagonian Indians. What counts is that the other culture be genuinely other; that is, non-western, non-contemporary’ (Artaud 1976, p. xxxix). At one level, Artaud’s pursuit of ‘otherness’ can be seen as part of his almost pathological need to escape the strictures of ‘Logical Europe’. In his impassioned ‘Letter to the Buddhists’, he wrote: You must throw them into the sea, all these whites who arrive with their small minds and their tamed spirits. We must make these dogs understand, we are not talking about the old ideas of humanity. Our spirits suffer from other needs than those inherent in life. We suffer from a rottenness, from

COLLISION OF CULTURES 15

the rottenness of Reason…. Come. Save us from these larvae. Design us new houses. (ibid., p. 104) Despite this violent rejection of his own culture, one cannot claim that Artaud’s Turn to the East was entirely altruistic or based on an understanding of its innate principles. It would be more accurate to say that he created his own ‘East’, an imaginary Orient, from which he derived sources of rejuvenation. Not only did Artaud interpret these sources in his own way, he seemed totally oblivious of their historicity and indigenous meaning. In fact, historicity was about the last thing that mattered to him. Therefore, as Sontag rightly points out, one cannot fault Artaud for failing to provide ‘accurate historical knowledge’ (ibid., p. xl), because he never sought such knowledge in the first place. But, on the other hand, his very denial of historicity places him in the familiar category of ‘men of the East’, who have trivialized non-western cultures on the basis of their own needs and affirmations of truth. Artaud’s writing on the Balinese and Cambodian dances are among the most alluring fictions of the ‘oriental theatre’ that have ever been written. Fictions, I emphasize, because Artaud’s essays are neither historical accounts nor systematic descriptions of what he saw—they are his visions of an ‘impossible’ theatre that ‘slumbered in his depths’. What concerned Artaud was not Balinese theatre as such but its connection with the ‘oriental theatre’, a magical storehouse of ancient rhythms and gestures, hieroglyphs and revelations, cosmic trances and metaphysics, mental alchemy and exorcism. The Balinese theatre was merely a stimulus for the theatre of his dreams, an autonomous, ahistorical, creation. If Artaud’s writing had ‘died’ with the performances he had imagined, we would have lost some rare visions of the theatre. But we could also have been spared some of the misrepresentations that continue to blur non-western theatrical traditions. Perhaps, the most unfortunate remnant of Artaud’s legacy is the very term ‘oriental theatre’. Like so many western categories that ultimately simplify activities and modes of thought in the East, it evens out all the distinctive characteristics of varied and complex arts such as Kabuki, Noh, Wayang Kulit, Baris, Kathakali and Chhau. Divested of their individuality, these performance traditions of the East become mere presences in an amorphous system. Their identities are interchangeable. Not only is Artaud’s use of the term ‘oriental theatre’ unconsciously reductive, it is also mystifying. Though he often used ‘oriental theatre’ synonymously with Balinese theatre, he more frequently used the term to express what the western theatre is not. The ‘otherness’ he inextricably associated with ‘oriental theatre’ was enhanced by his misreading of ‘cosmic’, ‘metaphysical’ and ‘supernatural’ elements in the Balinese and Cambodian dances. What attracted Artaud to these dances was not just the minutiae of their techniques but their concrete embodiment of the unknown, their evocation of ‘specters of the beyond’ (ibid., pp. 215–27). Artaud viewed ‘mechanically rolling

16 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

eyes’, ‘pouts’ and ‘recurrent muscular contractions’ as elements in ‘a kind of spiritual architecture’. Similarly, he envisioned in the taut movements of the dancers ‘a rigidity of body in trance stiffened by the surge of the cosmic forces invading it’. In his mind’s eye, the director became ‘a kind of magical conductor, a master of sacred ceremonies’. The very headdresses of the dancers radiated ‘divinity’, a ‘miraculous revelation’. One needs only a rudimentary knowledge of the Balinese theatre to realize that Artaud superimposed a cosmic signification on its signs and forms. This has been acknowledged by Artaud’s disciple, Jerzy Grotowski, who has never made the mistake of confusing Artaud’s vision for a technique or method of acting. In his essay ‘He wasn’t Entirely Himself’, Grotowski claims that Artaud’s writing on the Balinese theatre was ‘one big misreading’, in which ‘magic is explained by magic, the unknown by the unknown’. Unfortunately, this ‘misreading’ is not always acknowledged by most of Artaud’s disciples, whose ‘chaotic aborted works’, as Grotowski puts it, have been ultimately ‘cruel’ to Artaud himself (Grotowski 1968, pp. 117–25). Though one could argue that Artaud’s writings lend themselves to misrepresentation, one should not dismiss all of his speculations on acting as ‘mystical’ or ‘cosmic’. When he wrote in ‘An Emotional Athleticism’, for instance, of how an actor’s breathing is related inversely to the emphasis of the external movement or when he speculated on the points of localization in an actor’s body that can be used to project particular emotions, he could have been speaking of some of the essential principles underlying the training of a performer in the classical Indian theatre (Artaud 1976, pp. 259–67). The problem stems from Artaud’s attempts to classify his instincts by speaking of ‘male and female beats’, the ‘six principal combinations of breaths’ and the highest Guna, the state of Sattva, that joins the manifest to the non-manifest (ibid., p. 263). Such classifications are visionary speculations and should be perceived as such, not unlike Artaud’s belief (expressed in a letter to André Breton) that ‘the Holy Ghost-Vishnu-Krishna will raise up the antichrist’ (ibid., p. 407). If one attempts to analyse such assertions, it is necessary to keep in mind what Artaud himself realized with desperate clarity, that he ‘suffered from a horrible sickness of the mind’ that compelled him to be ‘in constant pursuit of his intellectual being’ (ibid., p. 31). Inevitably, it is within the context of his ‘phenomenology of suffering’, as Sontag puts it (ibid., p. xx), that one must place all of Artaud’s writings. It cannot be stressed enough that though he wrote ‘manifestos’ for the theatre, they cannot be literally applied. Like the Balinese theatre, which served as a source for his visions, Artaud’s writings can serve as a stimulus for us to find our own directions in the theatre. To illustrate or concretize his writings would be somewhat illusory, if not irrelevant. For all its torrential immediacy, Artaud’s world lies elsewhere. The ‘oriental theatre’ was a construct for Artaud, not a practice. He never attempted to situate his hallucinatory experience of the Balinese theatre within an immediate, performative context. Gordon Craig, on

COLLISION OF CULTURES 17

the other hand, could not avoid a confrontation of the Indian theatre on a historical level. Though he initially located the first home of the Übermarionette on ‘the banks of the Ganges’—a magical landscape with gardens, flowers and fountains—this rhapsodic vision of India was shattered when Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy published a very informative article entitled ‘Notes on Indian Dramatic Technique’ in The Mask (1913). The Indian scholar challenged Craig’s assumption that the human body, undisciplined and susceptible to unpredictable emotions, was not suitable material for the theatre. Had Mr. Craig studied the Indian actors, and not merely those of modern theatre, he might not have thought it so necessary to reject the bodies of men and women as the material of dramatic art…. The movements of the Indian actor are not accidentally swayed by his personal emotion: he is too perfectly trained for that. His body is, if you will, an automaton: while he is acting, there is nothing natural…that is to say accidental or inartistic. The movement of the single finger, the elevation of an eyebrow, the direction of a glance…all these are determined in the books of technical instructions…. Many of these gestures called mudras have hieratic significance…they express the intentions of the soul in conventional language. (Coomaraswamy 1913, p. 123). Craig’s initial response to the codification of gestures in the Indian theatre was sceptical: he felt that ‘it was wrong for human beings to submit to such severe discipline’ (ibid., p. 127). The Indian art of acting was more rigorous than anything he had imagined. It embodied all the ideals that he had articulated in his theory of the Übermarionette—an avoidance of personal emotions, a craving for perfection and absolute control, an absence of ego—but there was one crucial difference. The Indian theatre accepted the body of the actor as the means of theatrical expression, but he rejected it. In this context, one should remember that Craig was not particularly drawn to actors. His seminal essay on ‘The Actor and the Übermarionette’ (1908) clarified that actors were not ‘artists’. Rather they could be viewed more accurately as ‘slaves of emotion’, who allowed themselves to be ‘possessed’, thereby reducing their performance to ‘a series of accidental confessions’ (Bablet 1966, pp. 98– 116). Their faces, in particular, lacked conviction, ‘overfull of fleeting expressions, frail, restless’. In contrast, Craig upheld the sanctity of the mask, so resonant in marionettes, who were the ‘descendants of stone images of the old temples’. Rejecting the mortality of the human actor, Craig envisioned the Übermarionette as the actor of the future, who performed with ‘the fire of the gods and the demons’, but without ‘the smoke and steam of mortality’. This actor was different from a marionette only insofar as he was conscious of his gestures and movements.

18 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

It is significant how closely Craig’s idea of the Übermarionette corresponded to Coomaraswamy’s description of the traditional Indian performer as an ‘automaton’. And yet, Craig consciously distanced himself from any endorsement of Coomaraswamy’s views. In The Mask (September 1918), he acknowledged: ‘I understand Dr. Coomaraswamy a little, enough to know that he knows I understand nothing of that noble artificiality of Indian Dramatic Technique.’ Nonetheless, this ‘artificiality’ was sufficiently appealing for Craig to reexamine his theory of acting. The irony is that this reexamination did not in any way compel him to study the Indian theatre seriously. On the contrary, it inspired him to mythologize its ‘secrets’ with greater vehemence than before he had known anything about it. In 1915, he had written to Coomaraswamy: ‘I crave the instructions of the instructors of the East…. You know I reverence and love with all my best the miracles of your land, but I dread for my men lest they go blind suddenly attempting to see God’s face’ (quoted in the ‘Introduction’ to The Mirror of Gestures, Nandi 1936). Craig used a religious vocabulary (‘reverence’, ‘miracles’, ‘God’s face’) to evoke the art of the Indian theatre. In his imagination, it became a sacrosanct territory, at once ‘holy’ and ‘dangerous’. Craig returned constantly to the idea of the danger in the Indian theatre. If you go close to it, he warned his colleagues, you may never return. At times, he intimidated them in a more formidable manner. ‘And do you dare to dream you can be in a moment all that India is and not be burnt to a cinder in the tick of a clock’ (Craig 1918, p.31). Craig’s rhetoric is so florid that it conceals his very subtle and contradictory attitudes to the Indian theatre. In the following section, I will analyse a particularly eloquent article—‘Asia, America, Europe’—which reveals some of Craig’s ambivalent responses to the ‘Holy East’. To feel the ‘life in the East’, Craig claimed, ‘we must be of it’. At the same time, he could not restrict an appreciation of the East to ‘native’ scholars like Coomaraswamy. Craig did not want to be excluded. So he strongly asserted: I know no separation such as ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’, for on the day that I choose to wander far afield, be it to the moon or into the beds of Ocean, I may do so…and so also, I may go to the East and become of it any day I wish. (Craig 1918, p. 31) The grandiloquence of this style barely conceals Craig’s peremptory attitude to the East. Nothing could stop him from immersing himself in the East if he wished to do so. But—this is where Craig recognized the dangers of rhapsodizing —‘even as there is no returning for a true lover, be the pains the pains of Hell itself, so is there no returning from India’ (ibid., p.31). Craig designated himself a true lover of the East, someone who was in a position to understand its secrets. And yet, it was this very affinity to the East that made him distrust it.

COLLISION OF CULTURES 19

Envisioning the hypnotic effect of India on the western consciousness, Craig extemporized on the ‘exquisite fluting of the great and lovely Krishna’. He warned his followers that it was positively indulgent to listen to this ‘fluting’ because ‘we dare not turn an ear or an eye away from our task’ (ibid., p.31). The Indian theatre, Craig hypothesized, could be a dreadful distraction. It could lure his colleagues to abandon their work in search of strange and esoteric mysteries. Underlying this fear, however, there was an enormous humility, even a suggestion of cultural subservience on Craig’s part when he said: There is nothing for us to listen to, nothing for us yet. We Europeans and Americans are in the utmost need for we know very little…we are like fools beside wise men, we Europeans and Americans standing by Asiatics… and we of the theatre hammering away like slaves, we are the most ignorant of all. (ibid.,p.31) It appears from this statement, an apotheosis of self-deprecation, that the western world is not in a position to listen to Krishna’s music. Even if it were, Craig added emphatically, and this is the twist in his argument, it would not be worth listening to. An imaginative sojourn in the East could be a waste of time. Worse still, it could lead to a disruption of progress in the western tradition. For all his flamboyance, Craig was at heart a traditionalist. He chided his disciples, ‘Will you waste the few good centuries in which your forefathers built up for you a beginning?’ Using an apocalyptic vocabulary, Craig prophesied: A beginning is something, we are at that promising point. Must you prefer nothing to it? Do you prefer Annihilation to the chance that is before you? If so, then annihilate yourself and the toil of your forefathers in your gratified desire to see the marvel for an instant and die. (ibid., p. 32) The Indian theatre was at once a ‘marvel’ and ‘Annihilation’ itself: there could not be a more romantic juxtaposition. Shakuntala was Craig’s Belle Dame Sans Merci. What makes his position in this article so fascinating is its ambivalence. While desperately attempting to suppress his innate romanticism, he luxuriated in romantic postures. He resisted the sweet music of Krishna’s flute as much as he would have liked to have been seduced by its sound. Craig seems to have been aware of these tensions in his attitude toward the East. Resolving them with the grace of a tactician, he concluded: Whenever you see an Indian work of art, tighten up the strings of your helmet. Admire it…venerate it…but for your own sake don’t absorb it….

20 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

They over there are wonderful, and we can know it, admit it, admire it and goodnight. (ibid., p.32) This distancing of the Indian theatre does not indicate Craig’s indifference to the East. Rather, it reflects his acute awareness of the fundamental differences that exist between eastern and western cultures. Unlike some of our contemporary theatre scholars and anthropologists (who search too eagerly for universal structures in disparate cultural experiences). Craig respected the differences that exist between cultures. In this context, it is interesting to note that even though he was obsessed with an image of himself—modesty was not one of Craig’s virtues—he could acknowledge the ‘superiority’ of artists from other cultures. While advising his followers to ‘be themselves’, he urged them to ‘love all things of the East…but to really love them…remembering Goethe’s wise saying, “against the superiority of another there is no defence but love” ’ (ibid., p.32). In this regard, Craig’s assumption that the East was ‘superior’ to the West often compelled him to reverse many of the relationships that had been determined through colonialism. In his mythology, it was the artists from the East who were the ‘conquerors’. Pedagogically as well, it was the ‘Holy East’ that was in a position to ‘instruct’ the ‘children’ of the West. It is surely ironic that these sentiments were expressed at a time when thousands of educated Indians were compelled to turn to England for ‘instruction’. Macaulay’s Minute, one need hardly add, assumed the ‘intrinsic superiority’ of western literature. Wasn’t ‘a single shelf of a good European library’ superior to ‘the whole native literature of India and Arabia?’ Craig did not tackle Macaulay or any specific colonial law. ‘We are not politicians’, he once asserted fastidiously, ‘it doesn’t interest us very much whether England becomes Japan or Japan becomes America or America becomes the North Pole’ (Craig 1913, p. 91). What mattered to him was a fidelity to the ideals created by ‘our rulers, the great artists’. This ‘fidelity’ was strongly upheld by Craig in his short critique of ‘Japanese Artists in the West’, which remains one of the most succinct comments on intercultural exchange in the theatre. Despite his disdain for politics, Craig is obviously aware of its intervention in cultural matters. Astutely, he indicates that the Japanese artist in the West is ‘not thinking for himself’. Rather, he is thinking ‘under the commands of his Government and not of his Masters’ (Craig 1913, pp. 89–91). This artist has been ‘ordered’ to ‘study and imitate’ western art in deference to new currents of thought in his country. Instead of venerating ‘the past’, the Japanese artist is now under a new compulsion to breathe a ‘fresh spirit’ into it. For Craig, this ‘spirit’ is inextricably linked to the forces of ‘Commercialism, Industrialism…Debacle, Imperialism’, which constitute the ‘Living Dead’. While one cannot deny Craig’s concern for these changes, it is obvious that he never once considered that they were inevitable for an ‘Asian’ country as

COLLISION OF CULTURES 21

technologically advanced as Japan. In upholding an essentially static concept of ‘the past’, Craig assumed that the Japanese tradition had simply continued from generation to generation: ‘Your sons and their sons and their sons had learned some great secrets, especially that secret of all secrets about the oneness of things’ (ibid., p.90). And now, the new generation of artists wanted to ‘break up the Unity for the sake of the Variety’. Though one can share Craig’s distaste for the artistic consequences of this ‘Variety’ in the proliferation of oriental kitsch, it is harder to accept his unquestioned faith that the Japanese artist is ‘great’ only insofar as he ‘venerates and keeps alive the past’ (ibid., p. 91). This monolithic perspective of tradition seems to counter Craig’s own faith in the theatre of the Future. In his own visions of stage design and the art of the actor, he had broken new ground. But perhaps, we should also remember the preliminary manifesto of The Mask in which Craig had stated that, ‘The Theatre of the Future necessarily embraces all that has to do with the theatre of the past…. Without an intimate and affectionate study of the theatre of the ancients it would be impossible for man to create a new theatre’ (Bablet 1966, p. 102). Lurking behind all his fascination for marionettes and Krishna, one must emphasize that there was a deep love in Craig for performances in his own tradition, ranging from commedia dell ‘arte to the plays of William Shakespeare immortalized in the performance of Henry Irving. Appropriately, in a footnote to his essay on ‘Asia, America, Europe’, Craig had reminisced about an art dealer, who ‘doesn’t gad about pretending to be Chinese’. This man remains ‘faithful to Europe’, without succumbing to the fashionable trends in the antique business for ‘Buddhas and Sivas’. Most memorably, this ‘ordinary man of the world’ adores Henry Irving. This quality moves Craig to make the following tribute: ‘We artists of the West will get nearer India by cultivating the society and influence of such men as this than by running after the learned in Asiaticism’ (Craig 1918, p. 32). It appears from this statement that if ‘India’ had to be found in the West, it would have to be in the company of Irving’s associates. Enlightenment could not be gained by listening to Krishna’s flute. Rather, it would have to come from ‘the stones we are breaking as we sit hammering in our own jolly and dusty path’ (ibid., p. 32). And with that intrinsically English spirit, so evident in the rhetoric it becomes clear that Craig was not entirely cynical about his own heritage. On the contrary, he was fully aware of what artists in the West were capable of doing. And he was convinced that it was not by borrowing rituals and theatrical conventions from the East that the western theatre could grow. Rather, it was by exploring its own tradition that it could develop its potential and unearth its sources of poetry and magic. To juxtapose the attitudes of Craig and Grotowski to the Indian theatre inevitably raises the question of their differing experiences of Indian theatre. For Craig, the reality of the Indian theatre was shaped entirely by texts and commentaries, painting and sculptures. To the best of my knowledge, he never saw performances of Kathakali or Bharat Natyam. India remained geographically

22 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

(and culturally) distant from him. Grotowski, on the other hand, visited India in 1968, and he has made several trips since. Earlier, he had been exposed to some of the techniques of Kathakali through Eugenio Barba, who was one of the first Europeans to study the training process at the Kalamandalam in Kerala. Barba ‘transported’ his perceptions of this Indian performance tradition back to Grotowski’s Theatre Laboratory, where he had functioned as an observer. This indirect exposure of Grotowski to the actual practice of Kathakali, particularly its eye movements, mudras, and coordination of limbs, in addition to a knowledge of Yoga, enabled him to demystify the sacrosanct associations of the Indian theatre mythologized by Craig. It is significant that even when Grotowski staged Shakuntala, one of his earliest productions, at the Theatre of the Thirteen Rows in December 1960, before he had been exposed to the practice of traditional Indian theatre, his impulse to demystify the East had already manifested itself. Looking back on the production in 1968, Grotowski admitted that one of his primary impulses had been to ‘create a performance which could give an image of oriental theatre, not authentic, but as Europeans imagine it. And so it was an ironic picture of images about the East, as something mysterious and enigmatic’ (Osinski 1980, p.19). What was exemplary about the Polish Shakuntala though was not its celebration of stereotypes evoking the exotic Orient, but its deliberately mischievous, parodic and artful debunking of oriental icons. From all descriptions of the production, it becomes clear that Grotowski’s Shakuntala was not staged in the grand tradition of Theophile Gautier’s balletpantomime of Sacountala performed at the Paris Opera in 1858, where the spectacle of the Orient was created through temple facades, tropical foliage, elephants and a bevy of ‘apsaras’ clad in diaphanous tutus. Nor was it in the tradition of the ‘symbolist’ L’Anneau de Cakuntala directed by Lugne-Poe at the Theatre de L’Oeuvre in 1896, shortly after his phenomenal success of Le Chariot de terre cuite, an ‘anarchist’ adaptation of Mrichakatika by Victor Barrucand. It is said that money ran out for this experimental production, so that the actors were compelled to improvise ‘Hindu’ costumes with turbans and painted bodies. In order to endow their pervasive ‘nudism’ with respectability and an aura of religion, Lugne-Poe got one of his ‘plus…nus, clad in a turban and a bit of cord’ to enter the stage during intermission, where he sat ‘cross-legged, back to the audience, arms raised as in prayer’. It appears that the sight of this ‘motionless fakir’ reduced the dilletanti to a state of rapt silence (Jasper 1947, pp. 198–205). There were no such fakirs in Grotowski’s Shakuntala, but there were yogicommentators, who sat behind the spectators on either side of the room to interpret the action. Instead of the forest and palace that one associates with Shakuntala, the ‘spectacle’ (or ‘stage architecture’, designed by Jerzy Gurawski) was reduced to a solid hemisphere covered with a sack-like fabric, rather like the top of a gigantic mushroom, which was attached to a column that clearly resembled a phallus. These ‘Freudian’ symbols (mentioned by Flaszen in the programme note) were complemented by colourful and fabulous costumes

COLLISION OF CULTURES 23

designed by children, who provided naive and playful images of the Orient. Clearly, there was nothing sacrosanct about their vision of India. This lack of reverence appealed to Grotowski. Instead of reconstructing Kalidasa’s classic, he edited the text ruthlessly and added vignettes and references from The Book of Manu and the Kamasutra. The thirty-four characters were played by seven actors, while the spectators assumed the ‘collective’ role of the hermits and courtiers. While Grotowski retained some elements of Sanskrit classical drama such as the nandi, the traditional invocation and recitation of a prayer, it appears that Lord Shiva was worshipped by an actress and a manager who uttered the sacred words standing on their heads, not unlike Dushyanta who also stood on his head during his interminable lovemonologues. This playfulness was interpreted by the critic Jan Ciechowicz as ‘a parody of the traditional models of Ancient Indian Theatre…a parody of the generally prevailing image of India’ (Ciechowicz 1976, p. 30). While parodies of foreign conventions often reveal cultural prejudices and ethnocentricities, the very selfconsciousness of Grotowski’s experiment is what prevented his ‘Polish travesty’ of an ancient Indian fable from becoming disrespectful. It is worth noting that for all his denial of pieties, Grotowski had invoked Lord Shiva himself at a talk given in his theatre during the 1960–1 season: ‘If I had to define our theatrical researches in one sentence, one phrase, I would refer to the myth of the Dance of Shiva’ (Kumiega 1985, p. 115). Not that Grotowski was interested in embodying this ‘myth’ or situating it in a learned philosophical context. His Shakuntala drew its inspiration neither from Coomaraswamy nor the tenets of the Natyasastra but from new forms and gestures, sounds and rhythms created by his actors. One could say that Kalidasa’s text was merely Grotowski’s pretext for exploring a new idiom of acting, most specifically a ‘system of signs’. In this sense, he was working in the tradition of Tairov, who had also turned to Kalidasa’s classic for the opening of his season at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow. One cannot fail to acknowledge the sheer courage of Tairov in staging an obscure, oriental, ‘formalist’ play in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War. Rejecting the demands of a socially relevant theatre and a conscious commitment to the class struggle, Tairov asserted the necessity of the purest autonomy in theatre. He would surely have endorsed one of the fundamental principles affirmed by Grotowski’s Theatre of the Thirteen Rows, namely, that the ‘only weapon of theatre is theatricality’. Like Grotowski, Tairov was not interested in reconstructing Kalidasa’s classic. He freed himself from the ‘literariness’ of the text by exploring an astonishingly inventive mode of acting. Avoiding both the traps of naturalism and the stereotypes of ‘stylized’ acting (which Grotowski rejected many years later), Tairov explored fundamental principles of the ‘revealed body’ through the ‘rhythmic alteration of forms’ and ‘living scenic emotion’. Significantly, it was the very ‘foreignness’ of Shakuntala that inspired his actors to create original gestures, rhythms and voice patterns. In Tairov’s words, it was the ‘great gulf

24 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

that separated the ‘methods of the contemporary theatre from the hoary days of Krishna’, that enabled him to create his ‘new’ work of art (Tairov 1969, pp. 55– 62). In Grotowski’s Shakuntala at the Theatre of the Thirteen Rows, one senses the same sense of liberation resulting from the ‘distance’ of the text. In fact, this ‘distance was further highlighted by Grotowski through his parodic treatment of the text. In Tairov, there was no such impulse to subvert the text of its ‘religious aura of mystery’, which was apparently enhanced through the ‘scenic atmosphere’. From a perceptive review of the 1914 premiere by Krashenninikov, we learn how every motion of the characters, every one of their poses was a scene of its own kind. When the girls sit under the marvellous trees, it is a scene; when they get up and take the pitchers, it is another scene; when the tsar [Dushyanta?] comes in and they take fright, it is again a scene. It is likely that Grotowski would refer to these ‘scenes’ as oriental vignettes. Though his own mise-en-scène of Shakuntala was much less lyrical, consciously ‘pseudo-oriental’, oscillating between ‘trance’ and ‘convention’, grotesque yogic postures and fluid graceful movement, it had its own share of stereotypes. In a critical retrospective of his production, Grotowski observed: Shakuntala did come off, it was a unique, fairly suggestive work. But I noticed that it was an ironic transposition of all possible stereotypes, all possible cliches; that every one of these gestures, of the specially constructed ideograms, was in fact what Stanislavaski called ‘gesture cliches’. Though it was not like saying ‘I love’ with the hand put over the heart, but ultimately it was something similar. (Osinski 1980, p.19) From an ‘artificial system of signs’ which his actors had created for the first time, Grotowski realized the necessity of evolving an ‘organic’ gestural system based on ‘human reactions’. Shakuntala was the beginning of a period of research for the Theatre Laboratory (the new name of the Theatre of the Thirteen Rows) that focused on those ‘objective laws which govern the expression of the individuar (ibid.). Apart from the acting methods of Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Dullin, Delsarte, Marcel Marceau, Grotowski also turned to the training processes of the classical Chinese theatre (after his visit to China in 1962) and the traditional dance-drama of India. Mudras, eye movements, and breathing exercises were rehearsed with rigour and precision. For a number of years, Kathakali and Yoga provided the foundations of Grotowski’s psycho-physical exercises. But the more the actors of the Laboratory learned about Hatha Yoga and the facial exercises of Kathakali, the more Grotowski realized that it was futile to imitate the techniques

COLLISION OF CULTURES 25

of Indian theatre. While he had once acknowledged the integration of Indian techniques within his system of acting, he became increasingly skeptical about borrowing performative conventions from the East. Eventually, Grotowski was compelled to admit that the aesthetic of the ‘oriental theatre’ was ‘completely alien’ to him. ‘I do not think that we can adopt from them any techniques or that they could inspire us directly’ (Kumiega 1985, p. 116). The deeper he investigated his psycho-physical mode of acting, which required an actor to ‘sacrifice’ himself to a role, the more he realized that the actors had to find their own techniques. The most rigorous demands on their musculature had to emerge from an acute awareness of themselves as performers. This perception led Grotowski to adopt a more skeptical attitude to any convention or technique that appeared to be fixed—mudras, for instance. Five years after his production of Shakuntala, he realized that the inflexible nature of the hieroglyphic signs in Indian theatre prevented western actors from understanding them. If signs were to be used at all in the western theatre, Grotowski realized that they could never be codified like mudras. They had to articulate the ‘particular psycho-physiology’ of the actor (Grotowski 1968, p.24). In addition, they had to emerge during an actor’s confrontation with his role. They could not be preconceived. Whereas a mudra is timeless, understood and accepted by Indian performers (and spectators) from performance to performance, a sign (as defined by Grotowski) relates very specifically to a moment in a particular performance which the actor had ‘scored’. In addition, while the ‘score’ is made up of ‘gesticulatory ideograms’, they are not fixed like the signs of the Indian theatre: they are ‘immediate and spontaneous’, coalescing to produce ‘a living form possessing its own logic’ (Schechner 1977, p. 161). Part of the problem with some western perceptions of Indian performing arts is an obsession with techniques. Even if it is understood that a tradition like Kathakali takes years of dedicated training and concentration before even the fundamentals can be grasped in an authentic way, mere virtuosity of technique should not be mistaken for an innate understanding and control of it. There was nothing virtuosic about Grotowski’s theatre. It is said that when his actors achieved technical excellence doing certain exercises, they stopped doing them for a period of time. Once their bodies developed new resistances to the old movements, they continued with the exercises. Grotowski was not interested in perfection or virtuosity. His theatre was a laboratory, not a conservatory. Consequently, when Indian techniques and conventions were borrowed, they were never simply performed as showpieces. On the contrary, they were used as material by his actors. Another indication of Grotowski’s pragmatic approach to Indian theatre was his attitude towards Yoga. He stopped using it when he realized that it produced an ‘introverted concentration’ that was harmful for his actors. The most advanced stage of Yoga, it is well known, results in an equipoise of the mind and being when all expressions and feelings are obliterated. There is nothing

26 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

theatrical about this state of tranquillity, which Grotowski accurately perceived as ‘an internal sleep, an inexpressive equilibrium: a great rest which ends all actions’ (Grotowski 1968, p. 252). If ‘thought, breathing, ejaculation’ cease as an actor masters this state of concentration, how can he act? Why would he want to act? Quite logically, Grotowski concluded that Yoga was ‘not for actors’. Such an attitude prevented Grotowski from using the Indian theatre in an eclectic manner. There was nothing reverential about his understanding of its principles. He was never afraid to question them. If he felt that a particular convention had no resonance for his actors, he did not use it. At every point, he resisted the temptation to select the most decorative aspects of Indian theatre. Nor did he indulge in sensational techniques for their own sake. Grotowski believed that a concentration on the ‘purely physical’ aspects of any technique resulted in a kind of ‘emotive hypocrisy’ (ibid., p.253). He implied that a knowledge of Kathakali required more than the ability to demonstrate eye movements and postures and hand gestures: it required faith in a particular way of life and perception of the universe. Though Grotowski eventually moved away from Kathakali along with other non-western theatrical traditions, he never lost his respect for the ‘morality of work’ represented by oriental performers. In a significant address at a meeting held in October 1971, Grotowski explained this ‘morality’ through an analogy to sport. While a European is trained to perfect his skills in order to defeat his opponent, an Oriental uses his skills to ‘go beyond himself: to meet life’ (Kumiega 1985, p. 115). Self-realization matters more to him than competition. It is likely that Grotowski was thinking of martial arts performers all over Asia who embody this ethos. The skill of such performers is not merely an asset that enables them to gain something; it is ‘life itself, a way of existence’ (ibid., p. 115). Similarly, for performers in the oriental theatre, there is a submission to something that lies beyond their performance. Chakshuyajna, ‘visual sacrifice’: this is how Kalidasa himself had evoked the art of the actor. And Grotowski, too, realized that the actor was ‘holy’ only insofar as he was prepared to ‘give himself, sanctify his real, “incarnate” self in a total act of soul’ (Grotowski 1968, pp. 257–8). Though it would be inaccurate to make an equivalence between the ‘sacrifice’ of the traditional Indian performer and Grotowski’s actors, one can agree with the Polish Indologist, Marian Byrski, that an ‘exacting sincerity’ links the work of the Theatre Laboratory to the classical Indian theatre. Both share a ‘morality’ that is evident not only in the training of the actor but in the ‘selectivity of the audience’. The methods of the theatres may be different, but their ‘ethic of work’ is similar (Kumiega 1985, p. 115). Surely, one of the most difficult challenges that Grotowski faced in developing his ideas of the ‘holy actor’ was the relative absence of ritual in contemporary western theatre. Unlike India, where there is a framework of reference that links the ‘individual’ truth of the performer to a ‘universal’ truth, concretized through a specific system of signs, Grotowski realized that there was no such framework of reference in the West (ibid., p. 116). In his society, where religion had been

COLLISION OF CULTURES 27

politicized or reduced to dogma, there was no ‘common sky’ of beliefs that could link actors to spectators. Though Grotowski had attempted from his earliest productions like Shakuntala to create ritualistic structures in which spectators could participate in the action, with actors doubling as magicians, and later as shamans, these attempts proved to be manipulative and contrived. There was also the risk of succumbing to ‘stylization’ by consciously imitating mythic images and archetypes. Wisely, Grotowski moved away from these attempts to consolidate ‘group identification’ through the shaping of the performance structure. He turned inwards, encouraging his actors to confront their social conditioning and defences, by stripping away all that was extraneous to the exposure of their essential selves. Grotowski believed that ‘when all that is individual and innermost has been revealed, features of individual behaviour are eliminated; then the actor becomes a paradigm of human kind’ (ibid., p. 117). It was on this level, at this substratum of the human psyche, that a true meeting was possible between the actor and the spectator. It is significant that Grotowski’s exploration of this ‘meeting’ compelled him to leave theatre at the very peak of his career, when his productions of Akropolis, Dr Faustus, The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis Cum Figuris had acquired a legendary status in the European theatre. By 1970, he had already begun to move in the direction of ‘active culture’, the creation of para-theatrical work where there is no separation between the actor and the spectator. Since this exploration of human encounters lies beyond the boundaries of theatre, I have preferred to deal with it separately in the following essay. What needs to be stressed here is that Grotowski’s journey in theatre had taken him a long way from an initial confrontation of techniques, both within his own tradition and from the Orient, to a more immediate exploration of the psycho-physical resources of his actors. In his more recent work, these resources have been linked to ‘sources’ that underlie the ‘techniques of sources’ to be found in different cultures of the world. Now it is not the Orient or the inner worlds of the actor that matters to Grotowski, but those basic levels of human experience through which communions between individuals can be restored in our world. While Grotowski’s search for ritual in theatre eventually led him to explore areas beyond theatre, Richard Schechner has never failed to assert the diverse forms of rituals in theatre. More provocatively than any other writer on the theatre today, he has argued, theorized and speculated about ritual in crosscultural contexts with specific reference to the ‘doing’ of theatre. He has spent much time in India where he has observed and recorded performances of Chhau, Kathakali and the Ramlila. Unlike performance theorists who tend to focus on particular theatrical traditions, Schechner’s reflections on Indian theatre cannot be studied in isolation from his comments on the Balinese and Japanese theatres, the rites of Aborigines and the Mudmen of Asaro, the Yaqui Passion Play, the American avant-garde theatre and Disneyland, His ‘performance theory’ encloses views on ethology, anthropology, kinesics, animal behaviour, trance and

28 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

more recently, the left and right functions of the brain. Schechner’s eclectic interests and modes of perception are as prodigious as they are occasionally bewildering. He once remarked, ‘I want to reveal myself as a set of disconnected thoughts, which is the way I am. I want to celebrate my fragmentation’ (Schechner 1978, p. 92). Since Schechner’s writings conspicuously reveal his state of fragmentation, it is often difficult to know where one can begin to discuss his work. His texts and commentaries can be viewed as ‘environments’ of interlocking structures, passages and spaces, which frequently do not connect or cohere. This seeming randomness, however, conceals a very alert and fundamentally reflexive mode of inquiry that one associates with a post-modern consciousness. ‘For the self to see itself and become involved with that reflection or doubling as if it were another is a post-modern experience’ (Schechner 1982, p. 99). The problem arises, I believe, when the preoccupation with the ‘self overpowers the representation of ‘other’ cultures, which is, I would argue, the case with Schechner’s intercultural writing. One can accept his belief that a confrontation with ‘the other’ can deepen ‘our grasp of who we ourselves are’, the Other being, ‘another and a mirror at the same time’. The difficulty arises, however, when the Other is not another but the projection of one’s ego. Then all one has is a glorification of the self and a cooption of other cultures in the name of representation. Schechner presumes to represent ‘other’ cultures by placing them in his own ‘map’ of post-modern performance. Instead of questioning the validity of this ‘map’ to the individual contexts of other cultures, he upholds its universal applicability through links like sociobiology, computer languages and multinational corporations. According to Schechner, All of these share a rejection of experience—ordinary happenings along a linear plane, a story in the simple sense of ‘this is what happened’, or ‘once upon a time’. Instead, these apparently different systems view experience as what the Hindus call maya and lila—illusion and play—a construction of consciousness. The ‘ultimate reality’ lies somewhere else—in the genes says the sociobiologists; in the flow of goods say the economists; in the exchange of information say multinationals. What about post-modern performance?…Post-modern means something close to what postwar means: the organizing of experience in a period when experience is maya-lila. (ibid., pp. 96–1) Schechner’s nebulous links between these differing systems could be dismissed were it not for the fact that he attempts to contextualize them through a postmodern construct: maya-lila. In the process, it should be pointed out that the essentially religious, if not metaphysical concepts of maya and lila, have been totally demystified by Schechner in the interest of his theory. This, too, could be dismissed as irresponsible were it not for the fact that Schechner has represented

COLLISION OF CULTURES 29

one of the greatest lilas of all time, the Ramlila, to western audiences for the first time, and perhaps to many Indian readers as well. His representation of this predominantly religious festival must be viewed, I believe, within the postmodern ‘map’ of his affiliations and values. While I believe that Schechner is correct in emphasizing that festivals of India like Ramlila and the Kumbha Mela are also vibrant ‘entertainments’ and function as economic and social meeting places, he tends to emphasize the environmental, structural and performative aspects of these festivals at the expense of the spiritual. His Ramlila is predominantly a mela, and only fleetingly, a lila. Thousands of Indians including villagers and vagrants, deprived of the basic necessities of life, turn to the rituals in the Ramlila not merely for their theatrical vitality (which should not be ignored), but for a spiritual guidance that invigorates them to face their lot in life with some resilience and courage. At one point in his narrative of the Ramlila, Schechner describes a ‘boatrush’ at Somnaghat near the Ganga, where a horde of people jostle and clamber into the boat, while three women, the ‘epitome of patience and labour’, stand helplessly and then squat by the shore (Schechner 1983, pp. 244–5). Schechner quotes his description to call attention to the ‘ordinary grind and helplessness of lots of people’, who are ‘part of the Ramlila experience’. He acknowledges that one of the deepest oppositions is to be found in the ‘extraordinary time-spacenarrative adventure of Ramlila versus the ordinary grind of daily living in North India’ (ibid., p. 245). Even if one accepts the validity of dichotomizing the Ramlila through oppositions, it needs to be emphasized that there is very little evidence in Schechner’s theory that he has confronted this ‘daily grind’ of everyday life in India, apart from jotting it down in his note-book like any tourist. If the ‘daily grind of life’ is one of the important integers of the ‘Ramlila experience’, as I believe it is, it is necessary to confront this life in all its historical immediacy. Clearly, identifications with oppressed people based on an imagined empathy are not likely to provide the appropriate insights. The challenge, for any writer, of the Ramlila is to contextualize the event not merely in terms of its environment (as Schechner does), but in the larger social and religious framework of the Hindus in and around Varanasi, which is concretized through daily rituals, ceremonies and sources of play. Myths have to be studied not only in performance contexts but through the diverse ways in which they have been received by people from their childhood through stories, anecdotes, proverbs, mythological films and calendar art Then only, I believe, it is possible to make cogent observations about the ambivalent ways in which the Ramlila is seen by thousands of Indians. Not once does Schechner seem to question the validity of his modes of seeing to address the experience of the Ramlila in an Indian context. What concerns him is his experience, which he documents through excerpts from his notebook, random images, interviews, maps, charts and analogies to specifically EuroAmerican cultural stimuli. For instance, he links the use of Ramnagar as an environment to spatial explorations in the American experimental theatre. At

30 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

another point, he compares the Ramlila to the movies, ‘staged “on location”, using non-actors iconographically’ (ibid., p. 276). In scale, the lila conjures up for him big events like World Fairs and the Olympic games. In addition, the ritual procession of the pilgrims through landmarks memorializing Rama’s journey remind him of Disneyland, where Americans move from one fictional site to another that ‘actualize American history and imagination’ (ibid., pp. 257– 8). At this point, one should point out that the analogy to Disneyland is not ‘disrespectful’ (as Schechner fears), it is merely inaccurate. Ramnagar is not a ‘restored village’ that has been specifically constructed for the purpose of tourism or entertainment. It is a city endowed with a life of its own that acquires a particularly sacred aura during the enactment of the Ramlila. Certainly, Disneyland affirms American myths, but within a predominantly secular context. Journeying through its sites cannot be compared to a yatra, where the very impulse of the walk is rooted in a specific religious faith and an anticipation of darshan. The pilgrims at Ramnagar are not tourists and holiday-makers who have paid to have a good time, as in Disneyland. They are motivated by different impulses and needs that are intrinsically related to the rejuvenation of their spirit. The unabashedly American spirit of Schechner’s ‘feelings’ is not merely reflected in his cross-cultural associations, it is also embodied in his methodology. In a perceptible attempt to order the chaotic experience in Ramnagar, Schechner schematizes the lila through oppositions—‘town space vs theatre space’, ‘Tulsidas, Valmiki and the Great Tradition vs samvads, bhajans and the Little Traditions’, ‘Stillness: murtis, arati, “stations”, vs movements: processions, pilgrimages, exile, flow’ (ibid., p. 241). Then, also, there are equivalences: ‘Ayodhya=home=Ramnagar=the Maharaja’s Fort=rightful authority vs Lanka=away=beyond the city=Ravana=unlawful authority’ (ibid., p. 254). Even if one accepted that these oppositions and equivalances could provide the groundwork for a ‘reading’ that Schechner fails to provide, one must question the appropriateness of such techniques for organizing the ritual complexity of the Ramlila. Instead of examining the interpenetrations of the secular and the sacred, ceremony and play, Schechner calls attention to their distinctions. The lila and the mela remain dichotomies in his experience, as much as he would like to bring them together. Another methodological problem is posed through Schechner’s use of interviews in which questions are raised that clearly reveal his dominant concerns as a performance theorist. One assumes that an interpreter was used for these interviews (conducted in Hindi?), also that Schechner has ‘rewritten’ the transcripts—the sentences flow with an almost unreal clarity and attention to grammatical detail. RS: When you played Sita were you possessed by her, or was it, ‘just a role’? Vyas: I get the feeling in my heart that I am Sita. It is written: Whoever is a true devotee becomes absorbed in God. When you’re absorbed you behave as

COLLISION OF CULTURES 31

that person. If you cry it is real crying. When the actor believes ‘I am the character’, then he really cries. (ibid., p. 279) The answer is almost too pat, but instead of questioning it, Schechner promptly goes on to confirm that the anthropologist Jane Belo got much the same response when interviewing people in a Balinese village about their trances. Not only does Schechner insert a redundant intercultural verification as it were, he also implies, through his lack of analysis, an inaccurate equivalence between Balinese ‘trance’ and the Vyas’s absorption in Sita’s role, which are different states of being. At other times, Schechner mystifies his responses, for instance, when he regards the 96–year-old actor who has played Brahma for decades, as the ‘very incarnation as well as a representation of the god Brahma’ (ibid., p. 258). A more incisive reading is provided by Schechner in his interpretation of Naradmuni, who for over three decades had been regarded as Narada in everyday life. He never ceases to be worshipped, even after the lila is over. Quite understandably, for Schechner, the actor is not a saint, but neither is he completely an actor. This man is not Narad-muni, but also he is not not Narad-muni: he performs in the field between a negative and a double negative, a field of limitless potential, free as it is from both the person (not) and the person impersonated (not not). (ibid, p. 94) Though this construct of Narad in theoretical terms is sound, if somewhat convoluted, Schechner is rash in associating it with the actor playing Naradmuni and with Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet. It is not that this mode of acting does not apply to the two actors, but the point is that it applies in totally different ways. Schechner fails to acknowledge that Narad-muni’s degree of absorption in his role is of a very different order from Olivier’s in Hamlet. Besides, his continuation of the role in everyday life (when he is ever not Narad-muni?) has no parallel, to my mind, in the western theatre. Then also the social context of Narad-muni and Hamlet as roles is radically different. With very few exceptions (notably Oberammergau), there is no tradition in the contemporary western theatre of actors representing gods and divine figures as there is in India today. The core of spiritual belief embedded in the role of Narad-muni transfigures the performance in a way that one cannot expect from any performance of Hamlet. Underlying Schechner’s method in applying theoretical models to differing performances is his faith in ‘universals’. His general approach is to isolate a ritual structure of process from its particular social context and then apply it to another disparate context. This approach is shared by other social scientists and anthropologists who have recently turned to theatre to explain activities and rituals in terms of games and texts. Victor Turner’s all-encompassing concept of ‘social drama’, for example, has been applied to rites and picaresque narratives, to

32 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

Icelandic sagas and Caribbean carnivals. ‘Turner’s western pattern of breach, crisis, redressive action and reintegration’, Schechner believes, ‘is actually universal…the theatre of every culture I know about also conforms (to this dramatic paradigm)’ (ibid., p. 121). Though this statement needs illustration, which Schechner does not provide, it is unlikely that paradigms (such as Turner’s) can be applied to theatrical traditions in the East and West without blurring their considerable differences. Even if the structure of a particular performance by the Living Theatre corresponded to a segment from the Ramlila (and this is purely a hypothesis on my part), they would still mean two different things to their respective audiences. Schechner assumes that there are analogies between different cultural contexts, and that the structure/process embedded in one cultural txadition can be ‘translated’ into another pattern belonging to another cultural tradition. This is a very debatable assumption, and one that has brought the validity of ritual theories of art into question. As Clifford Geertz has argued, Formally similar processes have different content. They say, as we might put it, rather different things, and thus have rather different implications for social life. And though ritual theorists are hardly incognisant of that fact, they are, precisely because they are so concerned with the general movement of things, ill-equipped to deal with it. (Geertz 1980, p. 178) Schechner frequently neutralizes the context (or ‘meaning’ as he prefers to call it) of a particular ritual by concentrating on its ‘physical action’. When a ritual is taken from its original setting and integrated into one of his productions, the objective is to find an equivalent meaning for the ritual in an American context. For instance, in the Performance Group’s production of Mother Courage directed by Schechner, food was served during intermission, just as people in the highlands of New Guinea distribute pig meat during some of their festivals. The problem with such an action is that there may not be an equivalent for pig meat in American culture. Soup and bread (with or without Swiss cheese) may not embody American social structure for Americans the way pig meat embodies the social structure of New Guinea for its residents. On other occasions, Schechner acknowledges that the meaning of a particular ritual is altered when that ritual is transplanted from its own culture into another. What is ignored in this process is the interpretation of the ritual’s meaning. Schechner’s approach is to play the ‘physical action’ of the ritual and to accept whatever meaning emerges from it. Frequently, this meaning is a travesty of what the ritual once signified. For instance, the ‘birth ritual’ in Dionysus in ’69 was ‘taken’ from the Asmat in West Irian. ‘It means something different to us’, Schechner explains, ‘but I didn’t play the meaning, I played the physical action. You go to another country to see your own more clearly’ (Schechner 1978, p. 97).

COLLISION OF CULTURES 33

But what about the ‘other’ culture? Are its rituals there simply to be used in an arbitrary, personal way? Is it fair to take a ceremony from it that is part of its heritage, divest it of its original meaning, and then replay it for its ‘physical action’? These questions, which may seem naive and redundant to most social thinkers, concern the ethics of representation. It is with this issue in mind that I question Schechner’s view that ‘Any ritual can be lifted from its original setting and performed as theatre—just as any everyday event can be’ (Schechner 1983, p. 150). To situate this statement in its context, I should point out that it alludes to two cultural events—a performance of the whirling dervishes of Turkey in New York, which was advertised by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a ‘religious ceremony’; and a performance of rituals of the Shingon Buddhist monks. This latter performance was supplemented by contemporary Japanese music and a recital of Japanese war tales, because ‘the Buddhist rituals were not long enough to constitute an entertainment by western standards’ (ibid., p. 150). At no point in his description of these ritual performances does Schechner acknowledge the distortion of the original rituals in the service of American standards and expectations. Indeed, he accepts the ‘restoration’ of these rituals with equanimity: It seemed to me that the monks, like the dervishes, were deeply into what they were doing. They were ‘in character’—and it was impossible to distinguish what they were doing from what Stanislavski required of actors. I was convinced: these dervishes were Dervishes, these monks were Monks. (ibid., p. 150) What concerns me here is the equivalence Schechner makes between the absorption of actual monks in their ritual and the concentration one associates with Stanislavskian acting. I believe that this is a false equivalence, for the faith of the monks in their ritual involves a spiritual communion that cannot be classified in theatrical terms. Though Schechner has acknowledged as a general principle that, ‘Rituals in themselves remain, as they must, comprehensible only in terms of their original cultures’, he sees no problem in detaching ‘ritual actions’ from these rituals, which are then ‘metabolized’ in new contexts (Schechner 1984, p. 259). I believe that one must question the signification of these ‘ritual actions’, and their effect on the rituals from which they have been detached. What happens to the faith in rituals once its ‘actions’ are performed in a theatrical context? Is faith transportable? I believe that if one has to reproduce rituals in the theatre, particularly those associated with spiritual contexts, a confrontation of their ‘meaning’ is as important as an examination of their ‘actions’. For instance, if elements of the Mass had to be reproduced in the Indian theatre, it would be necessary not merely to perform the ‘ritual actions’ associated with the eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine, it would be

34 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

imperative to know the ‘meaning’ of Christ’s death in relation to these ‘actions’ and believe in it. Moreover, we need to ask whether these ‘actions’ can resonate meaningfully in isolation of the larger structure of the Mass, the church, the priest and the congregation. Schechner’s pragmatic belief that meaning is in doing applies, I believe, to performances within his own tradition where the ‘entire performance score’, to use his words, is shaped from ‘ordinary life’ (Schechner 1978, p. 98). The words and actions that constitute the score have familiar associations: they represent a consistent behaviour, a grammar of action. But when a ritual is used from a nonwestern culture, its words and actions are unfamiliar. The responsibility of any director, then, is first to learn what the ritual means within its own culture, and then to reflect on what it could mean in his own. Merely ‘doing’ a ritual from another culture without knowing or caring about what it means risks a simplification and distortion of its contents. Underlying Schechner’s advocacy of the use of rituals in theatre is a specific attitude toward differences between cultures. ‘The difference between “them” and “us” isn’t so great’, he informed the participants in a seminar on Ritual in the Theatre held in 1978, which I attended. While this attitude seemed at first open and generous, it became clear that Schechner was not really interested in understanding the perspectives of other cultures on their own rituals. Ultimately, he used the supposed lack of differences between cultures as a rationale for interpreting rituals in a personal way. According to him Kathakali is no different from Hamlet insofar as every performance of Shakespeare’s play is an ‘editing of the text’, just as every performance of Kathakali by a great dancer like Gopinath is a recreation of the rules (ibid., p. 94). What Schechner does not acknowledge is that there are rules in Kathakali that remain more or less fixed. If a great dancer like Gopinath ‘puts his own stamp’ on a tradition, in Schechner’s words, his deviation from the rules ironically calls attention to them. Certainly, every great dancer will shape a mudra individually just as every actor will speak ‘To be, or not to be’ differently, but the dancer will invariably keep in mind the mudra as he learned it from his guru, whereas the actor is relatively free to interpret Hamlet’s soliloquy in a manner that seems appropriate to his inner life. Schechner is surely aware of the guru-shishya parampara that is integrally related to performance traditions in India. An Indian dancer performs, in a certain sense, on behalf of his guru who had instilled the moves of the dance within him. As Schechner has observed, ‘A Balinese or Indian dance guru passes on the moves of the dance, often standing behind the student, manipulating her as if she were a puppet until, as the Balinese say, the dance “goes into the body”’ (ibid., p. 93). But the performance itself, Schechner believes, unlike the rehearsal process, is ‘truly contingent, an everchanging lila’ (Schechner 1983, p. 106). I believe that Schechner exaggerates the quality of contingency in classical Indian dance-theatre, where even the most improvised sections of choreography (and

COLLISION OF CULTURES 35

they are relatively few as compared with a raga, which is based on the principle of the improvisation) function within strict limits. I should also point out how deceptive it is to compare performance traditions in the East and the West using fixed criteria. It is not that Indian theatre is more ‘contingent’ than western theatre during performance, as Schechner says: the point is that they are ‘contingent’ in totally different way. There is an equivocal nature to the terms Schechner often uses, such as ‘score’ and ‘flow’ (which are predominantly western conceptions), that conceals the fact that there are more differences than similarities in a cross-cultural examination of theatre. With the development of international transport, the growth of the tourist industry and the widespread use of cameras and film, the world has shrunk as it were, and rituals, which were once strange sights and sounds for artists like Gordon Craig, have become increasingly available. Perhaps it is this accessibility of rituals that has tempted theatre practitioners like Schechner to overly familiarize them. The most blatant manifestation of this accessibility is the emergence of ‘cultural tourism’. Schechner’s enthusiastic support for this phenomenon is problematic since it concentrates more on what tourism has opened up for westerners (in terms of rituals, rites and ceremonies that were once inaccessible) and less on the effect of tourism on the rituals themselves and their practitioners. Here again, I believe Schechner’s pragmatism, so innately American (if I may insert a cultural bias on my part), lead him to view the distortion or disappearance of a particular ritual with a certain ‘moral neutrality’, to use a term created by Kenneth Tynan to describe Peter Brook’s attitude to the Ik (Tynan 1977, pp. 20–8). Schechner does not appear to be disturbed by the changes in ‘genuine’ performances that have resulted from commercialism and audience pressures. Of course he ‘hates’ the genocide that has exterminated the culture of the Australian Aborigines. But he sees nothing wrong with the tourist shows put on by the Balinese or the Mudmen of Asaro. After all, they need the money to survive, and tourism is a flourishing industry. Never mind if the middlemen and tourist agencies monopolize the industry, the artists get a cut from the revenue. It could be a pittance, but something is better than nothing. In response to the distortions resulting from tourism, Schechner claims that ‘genuine’ performances still survive along with tourist art, but they have to be searched out in secluded areas where the ‘natives’ perform for themselves. Judging from my own exposure to tourist art in several Asian countries, I would not be so euphoric that the ‘genuine’ has been able to survive the onslaught of kitsch and ‘package deals’. In Thailand, I have seen so-called tribal dances in make-believe rural settings, where the performers ‘recreated’ snippets of movements, some of them lasting barely a minute or two. Rarely have I seen more apathetic performances, where the performers resembled obedient animals, totally dehumanized by their conditions of work. In Bali, even the funeral ceremonies, where one might

36 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

expect a greater degree of ‘truth’, have become haunts for tourists. Death has always been an occasion for celebration in Bali, but now it is also commodified like Kebyar and Kecak. In Korea, shamanist rituals are among the biggest hits at the Folk Village, scrupulously choreographed and edited to ward away the spirits. As for India, where tourism has yet to ‘develop’ as in Thailand and Indonesia, the intervention of the government through the promotion of ‘festival culture’ abroad and ‘utsav culture’ in New Delhi has resulted in considerable tensions among traditional performers. Along with their marketability, there is also a new dependency on middlemen, who are responsible for their exposure to ‘foreign’ audiences. Schechner fails to analyse, or even acknowledge, the social and human turmoil resulting from this exposure of ‘traditional’ performers to the ‘international market’. As much as one has to accept that tourism plays a significant role in the intercultural dissemination of theatre, one cannot ignore its negative consequences. I am thinking of the rampant prostitution in Thailand that thrives on tourist trade, and the alienation of the ‘foreign-returned’ performers in India, who may not be victims of tourism, but of a different kind of cultural merchandise. Instead of conjecturing about the future of ‘traditional forms’, now that ‘festival culture’ has invented new ‘traditions’, all appropriately edited and designed for foreign consumption, one needs to question what is happening to the performers once they return to their native places. How are they accepted by their own communities? At least one Indian performer, who was hailed as a’star’ in Paris, no longer performs for her own people. Her clientele is almost exclusively urban and foreign. Any serious discussion of ‘cultural tourism’, to my mind, must focus on these contradictions and human dilemmas. It is not sufficient merely to speculate on the invention of new forms through the intervention of tourism, or to reflect on the relationships between the ‘spurious’ and the ‘authentic’. Even at this level, Schechner’s inquiry seems to be motivated by a post-modern fascination for indeterminate relationships rather than by a genuine concern for the integrity of the forms. Not surprisingly, he is compelled to ask: ‘At what moment does a tourist show become itself an authentic theatrical art?’ (Schechner 1983, p. 146). This question, which seems to view culture as a product that can be recycled, could emerge only from a mind shaped by the mechanisms of an advanced technological society. In India, the recycling of garbage has yet to be industrialized on a large scale; as for the recycling of culture, the conversion of the spurious into the ‘authentic’, it is a totally alien concept. Significantly, when Schechner was once asked how one can distinguish between a ‘genuine ritual’ and ‘a fabricated one’, he responded with a question: ‘Does it make any difference?’ (Schechner 1978, p. 99). My answer to that question is an affirmative one. Fabricated rituals are not at all difficult to find in the contemporary theatre. Schechner himself has acknowledged that, ‘Most of the rituals of theatre in our culture come during rehearsals. The ritual we see in performance is false’ (ibid.,

COLLISION OF CULTURES 37

p. 95). A fabricated ritual is frequently distinguished by the lack of skill and accuracy with which it is executed. Even more conspicuous is the lack of belief in the ritual itself. The most virtuosic display of the gestures and movements in a ritual can be ultimately false if they are emptied of content. One of the unfortunate developments of cultural tourism has been the influx of fabricated rituals within the cultures of these rituals. It is bad enough if a ritual from India, for example, is travestied in the West, but it is worse when this ritual loses its significance in India itself. The practitioners of many traditional dances and rituals in India no longer perform for the gods; they perform for tourists, research scholars and ‘experts’. In payment for their performance, the actors no longer receive prasad or the blessing of gods—they get money and, at times, nothing at all. After all, there is no ‘copyright’ on traditional performances. So many of them have been videotaped without any acknowledgement or payment to the performers involved. In contrast to this ‘cultural piracy’ the payment of money (with or without the mediation of middlemen) seems preferable. And yet, one must emphasize that there is a difference between exchanging a ritual for money, and practising what Eugenio Barba has called ‘barter’, where performers from different communities can exchange dances and songs on the basis of mutual needs. In contrast, where money is used, the ‘cultural exchange’ becomes a pretext for an economic exchange. And money, which constitutively suggests power, is very powerful in an impoverished country like India. The outsiders who give it are the ones who control the ‘cultural exchange’, and however cosmopolitan or altruistic they may be, they are still figures of authority. They dominate by their very presence in the rural areas of India where most of the traditional dances and dramas are performed. Sometimes the mere presence of tourists at performances in Indian cities is jarring enough. At a rare performance of the Chhau dances in Calcutta, I confronted some of the ironies of cultural tourism. From where I was sitting I could see the dancers waiting in the wings for their entrances. Before they entered, I saw them touch the ground with their hands to invoke the blessing of the gods. This gesture, which prefigured the earthy sanctity of the performance, was ignored by the horde of American and European photographers in front of the stage who clicked their cameras with callous indifference throughout the performances. At particularly dynamic moments in the dance, they yelled out instructions to one another over the beating of the drums and the clashing of the cymbals. There was something greedy in the way they vied with one another for the best shots. At the end of the performance, the dancers assembled on stage and folded their hands in the traditional gesture of the namaste. In this gesture, which evoked an aura of submission, and the glittering array of cameras and zoom lenses and projectors—a minuscule representation of western technology and power—I saw two conflicting worlds. Unlike Schechner, I am sceptical that the theatre is in the process of discovering ‘a world of colliding cultures no longer

38 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

dominated by Europeans and Americans, and no longer dominable by anyone’ (Schechner 1983, pp. 120–1). The Chhau performance made me realize only too bitterly how easy it is for the West to assert its dominance by virtue of its economic and technological power. If interculturalism in the theatre is to be more than a vision, there has to be a fairer exchange between theatrical traditions in the East and the West. At the moment, it is westerners who have initiated (and controlled) the exchange. It is they who have come to countries like India and taken its rituals and techniques (either through photographs, documentation, or actual borrowings). The sheer poverty, if not destitution, of most performers in India clearly minimizes their possibilities of travelling to the West. Only a few Indian gurus and dancers have had the opportunity to visit European and American countries for lecturedemonstrations and classes. Among Indian playwrights and directors, it is probably Badal Sircar who has had the most sustained encounter with experimental American theatre groups like the Living Theatre of the Becks and the Performance Group, which was led by Schechner himself. Though this American encounter undeniably influenced the performance idiom of Sircar’s Third Theatre, it would be wrong to assume as Schechner does that it resulted in a theatre that was both ‘more traditionally Indian and more experimental in the Euro-American sense’, (Schechner 1984, p. 250). Sircar would be the first to deny any affinity to the ‘traditional theatre’ of India. In a revealing response to Schechner, he clarified: We were brought up on the ‘modern theatre’—that theatre has been ours for nearly 200 years! We do not think of it as foreign. The folk theatre, that we think of as foreign…. I cannot just reach into the Indian folk culture. You probably know more about that culture than I do. We were taught to despise it as old fashioned and reactionary. (Schechner 1983, pp. 25–6) Not only does this statement challenge the supposed connections between the ‘experimental’ and the ‘traditional’, it highlights one of the strongest priorities of Euro-American interculturalists, namely their preoccupation with the premodern cultural artifacts of non-western cultures. Not one of the artists that I have alluded to so far in this essay, including Theophile Gautier, Lugne-Poe, Tairov, Artaud, Craig, Grotowski and Schechner, has turned to India to explore the existing cultural conditions in the country. What concerns interculturalists is not our contemporary or colonial heritage but our ‘tradition’ from which they derive material and sources to feed their theories and visions. I believe that this dehistoricizing tendency is one of the most problematic aspects of interculturalism as exemplified by Schechner. Instead of accepting the boundaries created through ‘nations’, he advocates the emergence of a ‘world information order’, where ‘PAN–HUMAN EVEN SUPRA-HUMAN

COLLISION OF CULTURES 39

COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS’ Can lead to ‘PAN–HUMAN BODY BEHAVIOURS/DREAM-ARCHETYPE NETWORKS’ through the mediation of ‘CULTURES OF CHOICE’ (Schechner’s capitals, ibid., p. 324). As the cultures in the world begin to resemble ‘performative actions’, and as the ‘information links’ among them become clearer, Schechner believes that ‘people will be able to choose cultures the way many of us now choose food to eat’ (ibid., p. 325). Though he has the grace to acknowledge that this choice may not be available to all people (particularly to those who don’t have food at all), he nonetheless upholds the necessity of exposing children (after two or three years) to ‘several cultures’ other than the one that they have been born into. Only by choosing other cultures would they be able to transcend the limits of their cultural conditioning. I need hardly add that this need to ‘choose’ cultures assumes an economic well-being that enables people to travel and acquaint themselves with the cultures of the world. It also assumes a certain dissatisfaction with one’s own culture, as if it were not sufficient to fulfil one’s inner needs and drives. Most disturbing of all, the impulse to incorporate other cultures into one’s ‘body behaviour’ assumes a disregard for the specificities of history, which are mediated through institutions like the school, the family, the church, the state, the nation. Interculturalism seems to override these concrete manifestations of history altogether. It is necessary, I believe, to resist the diffusionist impulse in Schechner’s interculturalism, where ‘traditional’ boundaries not only between peoples and nations, but also within nations and cultures are being abolished (Schechner 1984). One must emphasize that in a country like India, which is just beginning to define its history on its own terms, where there are so many cultural traditions rooted in particular ‘regions’ that remain unknown to one another, one has to regard the abolition of barriers between peoples and nations with a certain degree of caution and scepticism. At a time when the very idea of the ‘nation’ is being strongly questioned, if not rejected by a wide range of people, I think it is premature for us to assume that our nation can or should be supplanted by ‘cultures of choice’. Perhaps, instead of interculturalism, what we need in India is a stronger awareness of our intracultural affinities. It is only by respecting the specificities of our ‘regional’ cultures that we in India can begin to understand how much we have in common. So also, on an international level, I believe that we (in the West and the East) need to develop a clearer, more precise, and historical awareness of the particularities of specific cultures. At this stage, it seems that the particularities are being prematurely dissolved in larger, nebulous categories like the ‘Euro-American tradition’, not to mention ‘the Indian tradition’. Schechner claims that he is attempting to locate the particulars of ‘Indian, Japanese, Southeast Asian, native American, and Euro-American performance’, within a single performance theory. Perhaps it would be more fruitful for us to know something of substance about the diverse traditions of Indian theatre

40 POINTS OF DEPARTURE

functioning within states as varied as Kerala, Manipur and Maharaslitra, before speculating about the intercultural possibilities of ‘the Indian theatre’. There is a certain euphoria abut Schechner’s faith in recent intercultural work. To my mind, the number of workshops and papers and dance demonstrations does not prove that something truly meaningful is being exchanged between performers and scholars in Europe, America and India. So many workshops and demonstrations amount to absolutely nothing, or serve as outlets for particular egos. Most of the ‘international’ workshops in India have been organized by bureaucrats and cultural businessmen, who want to be connected to the power structures in the Euro-American cultural scene. Performers are merely pawns in this game controlled by the intercultural mafia. Schechner himself has acknowledged that theatre festivals in India facilitate the ‘Western taste for collecting behaviours as “items of culture” ‘which are then ‘dissected in a scholarly way at conferences-cum-junkets’ (Schechner 1983, p. 190). With admirable candour, he adds: ‘Who ever pays his own way to a scholarly meeting?’ Precisely. It is either an academic or cultural body that facilitates one’s encounters with other cultures. And these ‘bodies’, for the most part, are located in the West, where there is money available for research in those parts of the world where people have yet to obtain the basic necessities of life. One cannot deny the validity of research, but at the same time, one cannot ignore the structures of power to which it is affiliated and the contradictions generated through its intervention. If we in India need to pursue a study of interculturalism in the theatre, we need to contextualize our research within the inner necessities of our history. The last thing we need is to assume (as Schechner does) that a Euro-American perspective on interculturalism is applicable and acceptable to everyone. We must define our relationship to the cultures in the world for ourselves. And perhaps, we can begin this task by confronting our own cultural identities in relation to the prodigiously diverse cultures at home. Our worlds do not lie elsewhere, they lurk in the dark corners of our consciousness, waiting to be confronted and shared with our own people. REFERENCES Artaud, Antonin (1976), Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, translated by Helen Weaver, introduction by Susan Sontag, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Bablet, Denis (1966), Edward Gordon Craig, New York: Theatre Art Books. Ciechowicz, Jan (1976), ‘The Old Indian Theatre in Poland’, Sangeet Natak, 40. Coomaraswamy Ananda (1913), ‘Notes on Indian Dramatic Techniques’, The Mask, Vol. 6, No.2. Craig, Gordon, (1913), ‘Japanese Artists in the West’, The Mask, Vol. 6, No. 1. —— (1918), ‘Asia, America, Europe’ The Mask, Vol. 8, No. 8. Geertz, Clifford, (1980), ‘Blurred Genres’, The American Scholar, Spring 1980. Grotowski, Jerzy, (1968), Towards a Poor Theatre, New York: Simon & Schuster.

COLLISION OF CULTURES 41

Jasper, Gertrude (1947), Adventure in the Theatre, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Kumiega, Jennifer (1985), The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen. Nandi, Kesvara (1936), The Mirror of Gesture, translation and introduction by Ananda Coomaraswamy, New York: E. Weyhe. Osinski, Zbigniew (1980), Grotowski and His Laboratory, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, originally published as Grotowski i jego Laboratorium in Warsaw. Schechner, Richard, (1977), Essay on Performance Theory, New York: Drama Book Specialists. —— (1978), ‘Fragments of Dialog(s)’, The Bennington Review, December 1978. —— (1982), The End of Humanism, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. —— (1983), Performative Circumstances from the Avant-garde to Ramlila, including ‘A Letter from Calcutta’, ‘Performers and Spectators Transported and Transformed’, ‘From Ritual to Theatre and Back’, ‘Restoration of Behaviour’, ‘Ramlila of Ramnagar: An Introduction’, ‘The Crash of Performative Circumstances’, Calcutta: Seagull Books. —— (1984), ‘A Reply to Rustom Bharucha’, Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1984. Tairov, Alexander (1969), Notes of a Director, translated by William Kuhlke, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Tynan, Kenneth (1977), ‘Director as Misanthropist: On the Moral Neutrality of Peter Brook’, Theater Quarterly, No. 25.

42

Chapter 2 Goodbye Grotowski

You were already a legend when I first saw you at the Yale seminar. Now you had become even more of an enigma to your disciples. The word went around the room that you were returning to the theatre after your ten-year exploration of para-theatrical activity involving ‘beehives’, ‘theatre of the sources’, ‘mountain projects’, ‘special projects’, ‘openings’, and ‘meetings’ with strangers from all parts of the world. Now you would be going to California, someone said… but hush, you have made your entrance. You lumber in very slowly, like a decrepit Noh actor—a bearded, bespectacled, burly figure, dressed entirely in black. The first thing you do is to shut all the windows in the room, from which the sky could be seen in brilliant blue patches. Now, in semi-darkness and total silence, you sit at the centre table, fold your hands, meditate for a few moments, and then begin to speak. Amen. I cannot deny that your presence holds me. Your speech is more than a discourse, it is a performance, carefully nuanced through pauses, silences, breaks in sentences, drifts, associations, gazes into empty space and occasionally cold stares at particular individuals in the room. You are like a Stanislavskian score, fully textured and lived: everything has been worked out in advance, and yet it is happening for the first time. As I hear you speak, I am totally absorbed, but if anyone had to ask me today what you had spoken about in the seminar, I would be able to respond only with the vaguest generalities. Perhaps I was not sufficiently initiated into your way of thinking about the world. But it is also likely that I was responding to your own gropings in the dark, as you were about to enter yet another transition in your life. Wisely, you refused to define what you were in the process of searching. Your future remained unnamed. It moves me to realize that you had to leave theatre in order to discover new possibilities of living. After years of rigorous work on the innermost beings of your actors, you still needed to find a way by which people could be themselves. The stripping away of masks and exteriors, the search for absolute purity in gesture and voice, were intrinisically a part of your Laboratory’s research. And yet, this intense self-exploration through productions like The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis Cum Figuris, was not enough. You needed to strip away everything, most notably the ‘direct bond’ between the actors and spectators that

44 GOODBYE GROTOWSKI

was the raison d’être of your theatre. Now you wanted nothing less than for man to be ‘reduced’ to himself—as he is—‘not to his mask, not to the role he plays, not to his game, not to his evasions, not to the image of himself, not to his clothing—only to himself (Kumiega 1985, p. 162). Was this ‘reduction’ really necessary for your actors? Wasn’t Cieslak entirely true to himself when he acted? You would probably say no—the mediations of theatre through role, technique, training, performance, the viewing of the spectator, and more disturbingly, the commodification of the entire production process through publicity, tours, conferences, meetings, seminars—all this theatrical machinery could only distract the actor from realizing his essential self. Perhaps, you were not just ‘enlightened’ when you decided not to repeat yourself after the phenomenal success of Apocalypsis Cum Figuris in New York in 1969. Maybe you were just protecting yourself. At the peak of your career, you received all kinds of awards, titles, honorary degrees, diplomas of merit. A theatre in Colombia was named after you, and in New York, where tickets for your production sold at $200 on the black market, a research centre was set up in your honour. I can understand why you found it somewhat frightening to be on ‘top of the mountain’ of fame and recognition. ‘Better to descend of your own accord’, you thought, before the ‘crown would be snatched from your head’ (ibid., p. 221). But perhaps, underlying all these rationales for abandoning your elevated position in theatre, was a desperate need on your part to live. My problem lies with your decision to extend this process of self-exploration to all people, not just to the actors you had worked with closely over the years, but to strangers from different social and cultural contexts. Let us not forget that hundreds, and at times, thousands of people, have participated in your paratheatrical projects over the years. What was your responsibility to these predominantly nameless people, as you moved from one sphere of activity to another? Working in the theatre raises sufficient problems concerning the ‘personal truth’ and ‘self-realization’ of actors. But in para-theatrical work, where the human being is all that matters, it seems to me that the responsibility of caring for individuals is even greater. At one level, one could say that there was a deeply generous impulse in your need to extend the creation of ‘active culture’ to all people. Now there would be no distinction between actors and spectators, there would only be participants. However, I question your very dichotomy of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ in relation to the theatrical experience. It seems to me that you were upholding a fundamentally restrictive mode of ‘seeing’ by ascribing passivity to the spectators of a play. If there is one area of perception that the traditional Indian theatre could provide to the rest of the world, it would surely be the heightened consciousness of seeing that stimulates the experience of a play. I cannot enter the intricacies of Abhinavagupta’s commentary on rasa here, but suffice it to say that seeing is an activity in its own right, perhaps more charged, more concentrated, more

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 45

‘generalized’ than the action performed by the actor. The theatre has no meaning without the perception and imaginative intervention of the sahridaya (‘of open heart’), whose sensibility has been trained not just to receive the secret messages of a performance, but to participate (and thereby, create) its phenomenological immediacy. However, I am prepared to acknowledge that the sahridaya is a rare spectator, who upholds an elitist conception of art. For you, Grotowski, it is obvious that the very opposite impulses were at work in your democratization of art. By encouraging spectators to be actors, you believed that ‘what is the privilege of a few, could also become the property of others’ (Kolankeiwicz 1978, p. 96). This seems like the most generous egalitarianism, but let me emphasize that you may have been the most ‘elitist’ of experimenters in the ‘poor’ theatre. Before you decided to remove the distinction between the spectator and actor, you used to select the spectators who were privileged to see your productions. The criteria of selection? Generally, a meeting of eyes and some personal intuition that is best left unnamed. Even in the ‘open’ para-theatrical experiments, your selective priorities were at work. For some events, potential participants were urged to hand in descriptions of themselves to the ‘leaders’ in person. Though you eventually claimed that para-theatrical work need not be monopolized by ‘unique individuals’, your early statement in Holiday clearly contradicts that view. ‘Because it is not possible to have meaningful contacts with everybody, one ought to look for such people who are, to start with, akin: that is to say, feel a similar dominant need which surfaces in different ways’ (ibid., p. 13). To my mind, there is nothing wrong with this ‘intuitive selection’ so long as one admits that it is not essentially different from ‘casting’. For paratheatrical work, it is not the skill of the participants that matters, but their ‘readiness’ to take risks, to go beyond their socially conditioned reflexes and responses, to be themselves. I might add here that though everyone was a ‘participant’ in your paratheatrical work, and thereby had ‘equal’ status, there was always a ‘leader’ who mapped out the journey of the participants in advance. It was he (and invariably your leaders were men), who located the site of the exploration— generally a secluded, isolated place near a wood or a stream, with appropriate landmarks (a tree or a mountain or a mill). It was he who instructed the participants about the basic rules of the journey—don’t talk unless you have to. Make sure you have all the articles of clothing mentioned in your list. Leave me to decide where we will walk, when we will eat. Just follow me. Would you have been able to experiment as wildly as you have (and I don’t use the word perjoratively, but in the sense of daring, crossing limits), if you had not already established yourself as a guru of sorts? Would anyone have cared to climb a mountain or hug a tree and derive significance from these experiences, had they not received your silent sanction?

46 GOODBYE GROTOWSKI

On this matter, you are admirably candid. In your interview with Andrzej Bonarski published in Kultura in 1975, you stressed the need for an individual to detach himself from the egregor, or figurehead, that essentially artificial construction of the self based on what the public (and particularly, the media) makes of you. The egregor is what a person stands for in society. Without it, an artist would lack money, because people ‘don’t pay for the intrinsic value of a thing, they pay for the egregor’ (Kumiega 1985, p. 222). Though the egregor can jeopardize an artist’s integrity, its very existence is ‘expedient’. It seems to me that you were thoroughly prepared to take on the magnitude of your experiments—and not just creatively, but economically and socially as well. Funding has never posed a problem for you. In fact, I am somewhat amused to see how with all your seeming anti-establishment ways, you have continued to work within the existing economic system. Clearly, you have never advocated a revolution in the tradition of the Living Theatre. In your paratheatrical days, you continued to uphold the principles of private property within the rhapsodic, classless, nationless context of your work. Your disciples would accuse me of being too cynical. After all, what right do I have to question an altogether unique experience if I have not participated in it myself? A ‘beehive’ is not a production that has evolved through a process of training, rehearsal and performance. By its very nature, it can occur only once, and therefore, is not constrained to repeat itself like theatre. ‘Beehives’ are about participating in an immediate process, not seeing or judging a consciously crafted representation on stage. Besides, their significance is essentially personal, perhaps spiritual, and there are no words to describe the experience ‘from outside’. But what about the words ‘from within’ the sanctum of para-theatrical work? Surely they exist in documents, journals and that valuable compilation of ‘experiences’ brought out by your Institute entitled On the Road to Active Culture? (Kolankeiwicz 1978). Are these not verifiable evidences of the participation of individuals in your projects? I see no reason to distrust them any more that I would question the veracity of visions narrated by medieval saints and countless religious experiences ‘relived’ by yogis and spiritualists. If the documentation of para-theatrical work is merely a transcription of experience, surely this is a ‘limitation’ that applies to all writing from the most confessional to the most public. Words may not be the realities that they allude to and attempt to embody, but they have their own materiality that reflects, however arbitrarily and obliquely, the world we live in. All writing belongs to our world. Once something is written and published, it is no longer a ‘private’ matter. It demands to be read in different ways according to differing perceptions, moods and attitudes to history. Let me add that your para-theatrical work was unique in this respect that it stimulated its participants to represent themselves. Our theatre has suffered considerably, I believe, from the vicious myth that actors are essentially dumb. The history of theatre would be very different if actors had been allowed and encouraged to write about their own

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 47

participation in theatre, instead of relying on directors and critics to formulate their experiences for them. Though the personal documents of your participants vary considerably in their self-reflexivity and intensity of experience, they are concrete testaments of activity in a wide range of experiences. Inevitably the most resonant of these documents are also the most concrete. We sing. We give one another apples on the moss, we dig ourselves in a heap of leaves, we wash ourselves with grain. We run the whole bunch of us, in the river, we fall into the net and immerse in the water, we jump headlong into the muddy pit, we dance in the barrels with hot water. We wipe ourselves with conifer needles. We roast meat, keep watch by our fires, we dance frantically on the flaming earth, we fly into the pillar of fire… I wallow in the soil. I am smeared all over, have clods in my hair. Earth, the forgotten, inorganic substance. (Kolankeiwicz 1978, p. 25) In the relentless spate of actions (concretized through verbs), one can sense the undeniable energy of the participant, if not his total abandon. But how can one not assume from reading this description that it involves a surrender to Nature? Wallowing in soil? Jumping in muddy pits? Munching apples on the moss? This celebration of ‘country pleasures’ seems almost like a revival of pastoralism, a ‘make-believe twentieth-century Arcadia’. But this is where you might intervene and question my right to impose cultural meanings on an experience that probably had a very different significance for the individual. Perhaps, I am on safer ground when I criticize an ‘experience’, whose cultural significance has been assessed by the participant herself. In Margaret Croyden’s ecstatic description of a twenty-hour trek through the forest, we find one of the most blatant examples of the universalizing tendency that underlies so many perspectives of your para-theatrical work. For Croyden, the trek was nothing less than an illumination of ‘pure, ritualistic, sacred theatre’ (ibid., pp. 64–8). It conjured up an ‘amalgam of rites associated with primitivepagan-Western-oriental myths adapted to contemporary western sensibilities’ (ibid., p. 64). Almost as disturbing as the encapsulation of distinct mythical traditions into one category is Croyden’s non-questioning of the very process of their ‘adaptation to Western sensibilities’. What seemed to fill her with awe was that these rites had been ‘conceived’ and ‘controlled’ by the ‘hero-leader’ of the group, Ryszard Cieslak, in whose ‘beauty’ the entire pageant of events was inspired. Not only does Croyden fail to question his leadership, she even neglects to reflect critically on her own submission to the work. At the same time, she is sufficiently aware of the need to locate the work within the larger context of ancient cultures. Aspects of the ‘Special Project’ recalled Aeneas’ descent to Hades, Dante’s circles in the Purgatario, the rites and passages of primitive tribes,

48 GOODBYE GROTOWSKI

the festivals and celebrations of Demeter and Dionysus, the workshop of Eleusinian mysteries, the circular dances of the Sufis, and the Death and Rebirth myths of all cultures. (ibid., pp. 64–5) Not only is this list of all-encompassing myths pretentious, it seems to miss the essential point of your work, which involves a meeting between human beings on the most direct and immediate levels of communication. As Jennifer Kumiega points out in her comprehensive study of your work, Croyden superimposes metaphors and symbols on things that are meant to be taken literally (Kumiega 1985, p. 185). She ‘philosophizes’ about what is meant to be fully experienced. Nonetheless, the very fact that Croyden’s interpretation of your work was published in no less fashionable a magazine than Vogue indicates how your work lends itself to glamour and hype. As seriously as you have taken yourself, there are many others who have taken you even more seriously, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. In contrast to Croyden’s rapture, there are more self-reflexive descriptions in which individuals have reflected on their participation in para-theatrical work. A particularly incisive description is offered by Agnieszka Bzowska, who narrates how she experienced something like a ‘mad trance’ while rhythmically shaking a wet sheet with a number of participants. Following her ‘wild happiness’ when she throws herself on the sheet, followed by the other participants who land on top of her, she contrasts this ‘abandon’ to a poignant admission of solitude. In spite of the appearance of community and communicative gestures, every participant of the ‘beehive’ was alone, ill at ease, and desperately expressing feelings which in a normal situation he would have to control. I did not know until the end how to shut the inner cold eye and at the moment when its sober gaze had been dimmed, I felt something like panic caused by total helplessness…. And yet I still believe that what Grotowski says is right. (ibid., p. 59) You will pardon me if I say that the faith your participants seemed to have in you as a guide is a little frightening. You provided the mystical centre to their search, even if you were not directly involved in their work. Whether you like it or not, the role thrust on you was that of a contemporary saviour, a rejuvenator of spirit. In no public utterance is this clearer than in André Gregory’s testament of his ‘need’ for you as a ‘human being’. Using a rhetoric that one associates with a recently-converted born-again Christian, he testified: At the age of 35, when I was already a director, I became a student. But the good Lord led me to a course with Grotowski, and he gave me strength to go no further. He helped me to find Grotowski in myself…. Last year was

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 49

the most difficult of all. I believe that there is a wheel of time. Again I found myself against a wall: sad, aggressive and lifeless. So I came here and found life again. I want to thank you; I shall certainly come back and we’ll see one another again. (ibid., pp. 37–8) I think it is of some social significance that this confessional statement was not made in private, but at a public forum conducted by your University Research of the Theatre of Nations, which was attended between June 14 and July 7, 1975, by 4,500 active participants, including celebrities like Brook, Ronconi, Barba and Gregory. This was the forum where para-theatrical activity received a ‘once-only, global social test’—not a micro-structure at all. In fact, it was one of the biggest conventions that any alternative theatre movement has received in recent years. I stress the scale of the forum to affirm that ‘personal’ testaments such as the one made by Gregory acquire a definite cultural value in its context. It would be disingenuous of you to uphold that your para-theatrical work was restricted to mystical soul-searchings by unique individuals. If this had been the case, why would you need the active support of some of the most established figures in the Euro-American theatre? The fact that your University of Research welcomed the affiliations, if not official endorsements of figures like Brook, Ronconi, Barba and Chaikin, who have never left the theatre in favour of paratheatrical experiments, casts a particular shadow on your commitments. Going through all the ‘testaments’ of your participants recorded in On the Road to Active Culture, I cannot deny that I sense a spiritual hunger in the needs of your participants. I don’t know how else to put it. It seems to me that they needed something from you that they could not receive from their everyday institutions and relationships. You yourself could have provided the case study of their alienated dreams. In your self-analytical interview with Andrzej Bonarski, you revealed some of the traumas in your past life before the ‘satiation with public opinion and prestige’ (Kumiega 1985, p. 219). You told Bonarski that at one time in your life, you were ‘ashamed’ of yourself—your body, soul, expression, everything. You didn’t ‘like’ yourself, and in order to deal with this affliction, you needed to be ‘superior’ to others. Domination was your only way to survive. Providing your own therapy, you located the central cause of your ‘non-existence’ to your total ‘lack of relationship’ with other people. Only when you began to explore ‘human relations’ did you begin to change your life. Theatre was the locus of this change: What appeared to be an interest in the art of acting proved to be a search for and discovery of partnership—with someone, someone else—and someone who, in the moment of action, at the time of work, I defined then in words used to define God. At that time this meant, for me—the son of man. (ibid., p. 219)

50 GOODBYE GROTOWSKI

Your words move me, but can I deny their presumption? You are not saying what most traditional performers in India imply through their actions and beings on stage, namely, that they are offering themselves to God. They are performing for the deity, who remains an unseen presence, embodied in the flame of the vilakku (lamp) or the environs of a temple. You, on the other hand, are asserting a partnership with God. But who is this ‘god?’ The self within us, or the omnipresent Reality? For you, it appears that the ‘likeness of God’ is akin to that of ‘brother’, an almost animist essence that is embedded in the ‘earth’, the ‘senses’, the ‘sun’, ‘touch’, the ‘Milky Way’, ‘grass’, ‘river’ (Kolankeiwicz 1978, p. 14). In your mystical manifesto Holiday, in which you announced your initiation into a new life of the senses, the rhetoric embodies your awakening. Body and blood—this is brother, that’s where ‘God’ is, it is the bare foot and naked skin, in which there is brother. This, too, is a holiday, to be in the holiday, to be the holiday. All this is inseparable from meeting: the real one, full, in which man does not lie with himself, and is in it whole…. In this meeting, man does not refuse himself and does not impose himself. He lets himself be touched and does not push with his presence. He comes forward and is not afraid of somebody’s eyes, whole. It is as if one spoke with one’s self: you are, so I am. And also: I am being born so that you are born, so that you become. And also: do not be afraid, I am going with you. (ibid., p. 15) How can one not be seduced by the religiosity of such passages? You are the most rapturous seeker of the ‘god’ your followers see in you. In your evocations of ‘brother’, the languages of religious communion and an almost homosexual fraternity come together. You seem to begin where Forster’s Maurice ends, in a total sublimation of the meeting between men, in the woods and beyond. And yet, despite all these ‘interpretations’ that I seem to be imposing on your visions, there is something so ‘simple’ and ‘direct’ that you seem to be mystifying, which hundreds and thousands of people are familiar with in my part of the world. I am thinking specifically of Calcutta, my home, where people live in the closest proximity to one another, sharing whatever they have, at times on the city’s pavements where they live in one sprawling, turmoiled, united family. On our crowded streets, where one can never walk without brushing against other people’s bodies, we can’t really avoid touching each other in our everyday encounters. We don’t have to keep saying ‘Excuse me’ as people do in the West, even when they don’t touch one another accidentally in a subway or elevator. We are still in touch with our bodies without making an issue out of it. Alienation may be creeping into the more sophisticated areas of Bombay and New Delhi, but it is still possible to look into another person’s eyes, without feeling embarrassed or ‘afraid’. It is still possible to meet a stranger and make him your friend. We don’t necessarily think about these things, but I have a strong feeling that what

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 51

you’re talking about with so much (perhaps unintended) mysticism, is actually a very normal part of our everyday lives in India. So, Grotowski, I really don’t understand why you had to come to my country in connection with the Theatre of Sources. I know you have always had a very special regard for India. But why did you need to go to a small town like Khardah in West Bengal and work with a group of actors on finding their ‘sources’? What could you really teach them about their inner selves that they didn’t already know? It is clear that you were not interested in developing their psycho-physical resources as actors, which could have been of great significance to them. You wanted to commune with them as ‘human beings’. It is somewhat amusing to hear retrospectives of your visit by some of the actors who worked with you in Khardah. There you were, the God of Poor Theatre, getting them to maintain exterior silence (for three hours?) in order for them to feel their inner silence. And then, there were those inevitable sojourns in secluded areas, where your associates guided the Bengali actors to see their own landscape. Look at the river, see how the water flows. Listen to the leaves. Don’t throw the matchstick on the ground—the grass is holy. Follow your flow of movement. Don’t talk. Keep silent. Be yourself. If you had not been Grotowski, you would have been treated like a madman and probably asked to leave. But let’s face it, if the actors accepted your ‘madness’ there was something expedient in their interest. You were their first (and perhaps, only) possibility of getting abroad. You had come to Khardah not just to feel the Bengal countryside, but to select three actors who could spend time with you in Poland on the Theatre of Sources. Are you aware that this selection of actors for your para-theatrical work endowed you with considerable power? I wonder if you could have imagined the excitement generated in Khardah when you made your final selection. Generously, you provided the actors full board and lodging expenses and even paid for their air tickets from Bombay to Poland. The only problem was to find sufficient money for second-class train tickets from Calcutta to Bombay. Dear Grotowski, our economic disparities are ridiculous at times, aren’t they? And yet, they exist in our world, conditioning the control and sponsorship of intercultural work. It’s obvious that the Indian actors were not in a position to negotiate terms with you, since you had provided for the entire trip. But given a chance to assert what they really wanted from you, I don’t think paratheatrical would have been on top of their list of priorities. They would have preferred to investigate specific acting problems with you. But ‘acting’, alas, is precisely what you had left behind…. So, the actors went to Poland on your terms to search for ‘sources’ underlying the ‘techniques of sources’ from different cultures. Among the participants was Probir Guha, the director of the Living Theatre of Khardah, who probably had the most to gain from the entire experience. Among his recollections of your work, there is one incident that has never failed to shock me. This concerned an experience in the woods, where Probir had been instructed to work ‘on himself.

52 GOODBYE GROTOWSKI

At some point in his self-exploration, it appears that Probir heard the tinkling of a bell, followed by a rush of movement in the bushes. There seemed to be a spirit in the woods, as your disciples have implied in their descriptions of paratheatrical journeys. Somewhat unnerved by the experience, Guha returned ‘home’ to the camp headquarters and waited for the other participants to get back from the woods. One of them was carrying a blanket under which he had concealed a bell. The mysterious sounds in the woods were nothing less than the sounds of this bell, which had been played incognito in the woods. I said that this seemingly trivial incident ‘shocked’ me because it seemed to reduce your work to utter banality. There is also a sense of trickery in the experience that made me question how ‘open’ your para-theatrical experiments were. It seems to me that there was a kind of manipulation in the very structure of your experiments that was perpetuated through the separation of the ‘participants’ from their ‘leader’ or ‘guide’. Perhaps, it is this element of ‘leadership’ that compelled Victor Turner, the most liberal of anthropologists, to question the fundamental impulses of your para-theatrical work. In the ‘disappearance of the audience’ and the ‘ritualized experiences’ of your projects, Turner was reminded of initiation and puberty rites in Central Africa, where boys and girls have to pass through a series of actions (often hazardous) in accordance to specific instructions. In addition to these rites, however, Turner was reminded of The Triumph of the Will. ‘The role-stripped self is to be remolded by what Grotowski calls “the guides” into…what?’ (Turner 1980, p. 118). The question is disturbingly pertinent. What was the ‘brave new world’, if any, that your participants entered after they had been ‘reduced’ to themselves? How did they alter the ‘old’ world from which they had extricated themselves? Basically, what did your para-theatrical work lead to? A scattering of misfits or a global community? It is likely that you would dismiss these questions as didactic, and repeat what you have never tired of saying—namely, that your work aims primarily at achieving something very ‘simple’, a ‘direct’ and ‘immediate’ communion between human beings. This ‘communion’ is so ‘primal’ that it transcends the specificities of cultural differences and contextual realities. In a talk delivered at York University, Toronto, you provided some insights into your Theatre of Sources. According to you, when a Latin American Indian, a Brahmin Indian and a Japanese work together, they are bound through a ‘simple action’ that ‘works’ for all of them. This action could be ‘childlike’, emerging from the ‘almost infantile preferences’ of the actors. It could involve climbing a tree, or running, or walking around with a handkerchief tied around one’s eyes. These ‘points of departure’, you stress, are ‘mostly personal preferences, but not the preferences of a particular tradition’ (Kumiega 1985, p. 234). In other words, it seems that the dimensions of culture that concern you are pre-cultural, before one’s basic impulses have been conditioned by the rules and codes of the society that one is born into.

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 53

For you, neither ‘inculturation’ nor ‘acculturation’ appear to be valid points of reference. Your ‘sources’ seem to elude the mediations of culture altogether. About the most concrete evidence of these sources, for you, is to be found in the child, whose ‘immediacy’ touches you—that immediacy which is at the same time ‘energetic’, and which ‘carries in itself joy’ (ibid., p. 234). Cautiously, and perhaps in deference to your own awareness of horror in this world, you add: ‘Perhaps the word joy is too much. Perhaps we should only say lack of anguish, lack of energetic depression.’ For us in India, the challenge is to transfer the energies of our daily meetings to our largely moribund theatre. As I suggested earlier, para-theatrical activity is inextricably a part of our everyday lives in India, where meetings with strangers can take place on the street, train journeys can resemble pilgrimages, and the interior of a bus can feel like a ‘beehive’. We need to be much more aware of the multitudinous energies that we take for granted in such ‘meetings’. Life is what makes theatre, and if we ignore its immediacies and possibilities of integration, our theatre is essentially dead. There is a lot of dead theatre in the world today, particularly in capitalist societies like America, whose regional theatres are like factories, where plays are manufactured in less than six weeks and performed by a group of actors who remain strangers to one another and the audience as well. Not only are these actors alienated from their means of production, they are, more sadly and irrevocably, alienated from themselves. Wisely, you have stayed away from these regional theatres while pursuing your own theatre research in California. You may not be aware of it, but technically, you’re a ‘superstar’, which is surely the category in which you have been placed by your employers at the University of California. You will learn how Americans use words like ‘superstar’, conflating the worlds of showbiz and academia. In time to come, you may even be formally enshrined as a ‘genius’ when you win the McArthur Award. But for the moment, it is not clear to many people (including your disciples) what you are doing with your new group of actors in California, though it appears that you are working them very hard. Who knows? Maybe you will have another theatre company one day. Maybe you won’t. The point is, Grotowski, that it doesn’t really matter. Your search is essentially personal and continuous. You will always frustrate any attempt by a writer to ‘fix’ you in the past tense. Emphatically, you and your work are ‘present continuous’. In this regard, I remember talking about you to an elderly Polish lady shortly after the Yale seminar. She knew you from your early days at the Theatre of the Thirteen Rows. ‘Grotowski?’ she remarked, with a slight raise of her eyebrows. ‘In what manifestation did you see him this time?’ I think that question sums you up. If we had to meet again, I’m not sure I would recognize you. But it doesn’t matter: your journey is not mine, our needs are different. So, good-bye Grotowski, it was good to meet you in words and thoughts, if only to clarify that differences are not necessarily alienating. On the

54 GOODBYE GROTOWSKI

contrary, they can serve to illuminate our areas of darkness and bring us a little closer to what you have cautiously termed ‘lack of anguish, lack of energetic depression’, which I would prefer to call ‘joy’. REFERENCES Kolankeiwicz, Leszek (1978), On the Road to Active Culture, translated by Boleslaw Taborski, Publication of Laboratory Theatre, for private circulation only. Kumiega, Jennifer (1985), The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen. Turner, Victor (1980), ‘Acting in Everyday life and Everyday Life in Acting’, From Ritual to Theatre, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Chapter 3 The theatre of migrants

What was my first day in the theatre? Perhaps, it was the day of separation, the day I lost my mother tongue and made myself into a foreigner, in a country which was not the country of my birth. –Eugenio Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands Eugenio Barba left home at the age of 17. From the village of Gallipoli in South Italy where he grew up, he emigrated to Norway after studying for three years at the Naples Military College. In his new country, he worked as a welder, then as a sailor on tankers travelling to the Orient. Still later, he emigrated once more to Denmark, when he was invited to pursue his theatre research in the town of Holstebro, where he is presently based. Today, as one of the foremost explorers of ‘theatre anthropology’ in the world, he continues to travel to Japan, India, Venezuela, Peru and Indonesia, among other countries. He and his actors (also ‘foreign’ like their director) have conducted ‘barters’ all over the world, with tribal communities in the Amazon Basin and with peasants in Sicilian villages. It seems that they will never stop travelling. The world is their home from which they are permanently estranged. Strangers everywhere, the actors of the Odin Teatret are not concerned with defining themselves through their points of origin, but with their ceaseless movement from one place to another. Truly, as Ferdinando Taviani puts it, they can be most accurately described as migrants rather than emigrants, and their theatre, too, can be most meaningfully envisioned in the context of migration (Barba 1986, p. 273). Today, when one sees the Odin Teatret demonstrate its rigorous training methods in public performances, it is only too easy to surrender to their virtuosity and forget that it is the outcome of many years of arduous, selfanalytical work, which still continues. The phenomenal technique of Odin’s actors is deceptive if one cannot situate it within the context of their early pain and self-imposed isolation, their hermeticism and almost desperate openness to the sources of theatre in the world.

56 THE THEATRE OF MIGRANTS

Barba provided this ‘world’ through his research and travel. It is not always acknowledged that he was one of the first Europeans to attempt a systematic study of non-western theatre sources for the creation of new idioms of acting. His early trip to the Kerala Kalamandalam in 1963 was a vital contribution to Grotowski’s exploration of a psycho-physical language, which Barba had observed at close quarters in Poland. Later, when he tested these sources within his own training process for actors, Barba accepted that Kathakali, like all ‘oriental theatre’, cannot be copied or transplanted. All Odin’s actors could do was to use the exercises of Kathakali as ‘a stimulus, a point of departure’ (Barba 1986, p. 57). Perhaps it was Barba’s study of the History of Religions that enabled him to respect the innate context of traditional performances like Kathakali. In an early interview with Bent Hegested entitled ‘Strangers in the Theatre’, Barba clarified: A ritual is always built up around the repetition of an action which was originally performed by a god or a supernatural hero. The moment we divorce this technique from its religious belief, we are left with nothing but an empty shell, a formula which the critics attach to the phenomena of theatre when they cannot be categorized in any other way. (ibid., p. 45) Though Barba did not equate Kathakali with ‘ritual’, he was aware that its performance was permeated with a ‘religious belief, that compelled the actor to ‘dedicate his work and his performance to divinities’ (ibid., p. 58). In observing the exercises, songs, prayers and offerings of the young students at the Kalamandalam, Barba realized how they ‘crystallized their ethos through artistic behaviour and ethical attitude’ (Barba, ‘Eurasian Theatre’, p. 1). He also realized that their virtuosity could not be acquired passively, because it had been deeply ingrained in their bodies through a system of training that begins in their childhood. This training is not just ‘physical’ but one that totally conditions the being of the actor in relation to everyday aspects of life. Isolated from the ethos of Kathakali, Odin’s actors had no choice but to confront their own sources of energy, rhythm and ‘personal truth’, within the boundaries of a microscopic community. Ironically, to ‘free’ his actors, Barba placed the severest limits on their physical training and social relationships. Austerity and solitude were synonymous with the Odin Teatret, which was once described as ‘a monastic outpost of theatre on the edge of Europe’. To my mind, the introversion of Barba’s leading actors has deepened to such an extent that they seem to flagellate themselves in performance, almost like Christian martyrs. Clearly, they have been trained to ‘violate’ their own bodies, or more precisely, the ‘natural’ rhythms and energies of their bodies, which have been shaped by the mechanisms of our world. Barba is not reluctant to use a ‘violent’ vocabulary to express the ‘laws’ of acting. Taking his cue from masters of traditional performance in Asia, he speaks

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 57

frequently of ‘killing’ the ‘natural’ rhythms of the body, without which the ‘fictional body’ of the actor can never be shaped. He also speaks of the ‘second colonization’ of the body, which emerges through resistances that enable the actors to discover new, more ‘immediate’ and ‘spontaneous’ energies. The ‘first colonization’ of the body, of course, is the result of our social conditioning, the formation of our everyday gestures relating to eating, sleeping, walking. It is oddly Marxist for Barba to use the term ‘colonization’ in the context of liberation. But his use of the term also compels one to pause and question. In recent years, it has become increasingly problematic to accept Marx’s assumption that India had to be colonized by the British before a social revolution could be precipitated. Even if one does not situate this assumption within an orientalist context of redemption, it does raise some questions. Do we really have to ‘kill’ something before creating something new? Is a foreign intervention obligatory in order to realize one’s possibilities of growth? Can one not work within the existing (‘natural’) resources, and allow something to emerge from them? Undeniably, there is an almost perverse fascination in Barba for the ‘extradaily’ movements and gestures of the body which violate the ‘daily’ representation of actions synonymous with naturalism. Barba’s theatre is virulently anti-naturalistic. He can scarcely conceal his bitterness when he states in ‘Theatre Anthropology: First Hypothesis’ that ‘our western civilization seems to neglect and often to deliberately hinder, every departure form the “normal”, reacting defensively as if these new energies could become a threat to our comfortably established relationships’ (Barba 1986, p. 120). Instead of working within the limits placed on the body through western systems of mechanization and technology, concepts of linearity and psychology, Barba is obsessed with ‘deforming’ the body in accordance to ‘laws’ underlying oriental theatres like Noh, Kabuki, Odissi, Baris, Legong. martial arts, Chinese opera and a few western representations of non-naturalistic, non-psychological acting, notably from the Decroux School of Mime and Dario Fo. In this eclectic assortment of performance traditions, Barba is less concerned with their conventions or performance styles than with ‘what lies beneath their luminous and seductive epidermises’, the ‘organs’ which keep them alive (Barba, ‘Eurasian Theatre’, p. 1). It is at this subterranean level that Barba believes one can speak of a ‘tradition of traditions’, to which he links himself along with oriental theatre artists like Sanjukta Panigrahi (Odissi), Katsuko Azuma (Buyo, Noh), Tsao Chun-Lin (Chinese opera), Sawamura Sojuro (Kabuki), Mannojo Nomura (Kyogen), I Made Pasek Tempo (Topeng). This ‘Eurasian theatre’, as Barba describes it, cuts across all distinctions of genre (mime or Odissi), and the specificities of time (classical dance or experimental theatre). It is united through a ‘common technical substratum’ wherein rests the ‘domain of pre-expressivity’—a state of being which precedes the expression of the actor, holding our attention through particular uses of the body.

58 THE THEATRE OF MIGRANTS

One need hardly add that this preoccupation with the bios of the actor—‘life’, presence, energy—in isolation of his (her) history, psychology, sociology, political ideology, risks the most severe criticism from several quarters. Shrewdly, Barba anticipates this criticism by providing some useful qualifications: At this pre-expressive level, the principles are the same, even though they nurture the enormous differences which exist between one tradition and another, one actor and another. They are analogous principles because they are born of similar physical conditions in different contexts. They are not, however, homologous since they do not share a common history. (Barba, ‘Eurasian Theatre’, p. 5) Even on an ‘analogical’ level, it is arguable whether the ‘physical conditions’ of Kathakali or Topeng, Odissi and Dario Fo’s mime, are similar. To juxtapose Sanjukta Panigrahi with Fo, as Barba does in a series of photographs in Beyond the Floating Islands (1986) serves only to highlight the antitheses of the performers. What is Barba seeing in their correspondences that lie ‘beyond culture, history and style’? Clearly, the laws of bios (on which they are apparently connected) are invisible. I suppose that, at the very heart of my objection to Barba’s ‘laws’ (or ‘rules of behaviour’), is my inability to see any performance on an exclusively preexpressive level. Surely when I watch Sanjukta Panigrahi dance (even in a demonstration), it is not merely to observe the displacement of energy in her body or the tensions embodied in her immobility. I am compelled to see and feel how these ‘physical laws’ evoke particular emotions in a specific performative context. The anatomy of the actor is of no use until it is contextualized within an expressive framework. What can it possibly mean otherwise? The bios of the actor becomes significant only in relation to his/her ethos; it cannot be separated from ‘culture, history, and style’. The more Barba attempts to compare the laws of bios on a transcultural level, the more he diffuses the potentialities of the body, and more crucially, their possibilities of rendering multiple meanings. In his rather strained, yet meticulous comparisons between the wagoto style of Kabuki and the tribhangi of Odissi, the footwork of Balinese dance and Kathakali, the equivalences between ki-hai (the Noh term for ‘energy’) with the Indian prana, the correspondences of the Balinese kras/manis levels of energy with the Indian tandava/lasya, Barba merely succeeds in illustrating his core of extra-daily principles of acting—‘alteration of balance’, ‘the play of oppositions’, and ‘consistent inconsistency’. What is missing in his transcultural construction of the ‘fictional body’ are details of life. Anatomy is a poor substitute for the being of the actor. Another aspect of Barba’s schematization that concerns me is the schism he establishes between the ‘daily’ and ‘extra-daily’ modes of representation, or natyadharmi and lokadharmi as they are designated in the Natyasastra, What

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 59

needs to be emphasized is that these modes are inextricably linked through their difference. One cannot fully understand the significance of an extra-daily movement or gesture if one is not able to trace its ‘roots’ in ‘daily’ sources and phenomena. What is natyadharmi but the extension, the elaboration, the magnification, the alteration of what is perceptible in everyday life? If one had to sever its links from our living history, it would become purely decorative, an ‘empty shell’. While Barba acknowledges that the pre-expressive principles of acting ‘do not share a common history’, he does not attempt to examine the individual histories underlying terms like tribhangi or ki-hai or tandava. Rather, he establishes equivalences between culture-bound movements and energies on the basis of anatomical principles. While this generalizing perspective has some value on a pedagogical level, it also risks being reductive and pointless. What does it matter if tandava corresponds to kras in so far as they both connote ‘vigour’? Is it not more essential to situate this term within the mythos of its origin, the dance of Shiva, whose very form gives a specific meaning to tandava? Movements, however abstract or disembodied, cannot be separated from concepts of the body and the universe. Once again, I repeat it is the substratum of life that gives meaning to dance, not the anatomy of the performer, which is itself a reaction to particular tendencies in history. It is significant that my critique of Barba’s ahistoricity has been echoed by some western observers of his anthropological research. I say ‘significant’ because it could mean that the premises of my critique are not entirely culturebound. Barba’s particular perception of the body in isolation of what I must categorically call life (in all its worldly manifestations) raises disturbing questions for theatre people everywhere. In his controversial seminar on ‘The Female Role as Represented on the Stage’, he provoked yet another dilemma of perception in his tacit refusal to situate the body within conventional categories of sexuality. He made it clear that ‘the existence of an Anima-energy and an Animus-energy’, which constitute the ‘double-edged nature of the actor’s energy’, have nothing to do with ‘the distinctions between masculine and feminine’ (Barba 1987, p. 237). At least two feminists who attended the workshop, Erika Munk and Susan Bassnett, had severe problems accepting this defeminization of the ‘female role’ in theatre. Both questioned the predominant male assumption that ‘femininity’ is best conveyed by male actors; both had problems with the total absence of discussion relating to the stereotypes and social roles of women as conveyed by men; and most critically, both women resisted the very concept of preexpressivity that seemed to neutralize sexuality altogether. In her ‘Perceptions on the ISTA Congress’ (New Theatre Quarterly, August 1987), Bassnett admits that she could never imagine herself in a state of prefemininity. For her, the male/female distinctions would have to exist on any level of characterization. Munk is even more vehement about her dissatisfaction with the Congress: ‘When men are securely in power, they will play women’s

60 THE THEATRE OF MIGRANTS

roles, create the very idea of womanhood, and smugly tap into “feminine” energy while refusing to allow women to use it’ (Munk 1986, p. 42). Levelling her critique more directly at Barba, whose ‘resistance to open exchange is guruism in its fearful decadence’, Munk asserts that ‘an authoritarian and anti-feminist theatre can’t conceivably engage a subject like the representation of the female role without first questioning it own practice’. Barba has clearly questioned his own practice, but without Munk’s sense of history. In his extremely lyrical essay on ‘The Actor’s Energy’, which conceals a strong polemic, Barba affirms that it may be ‘useful’ to confront the ‘vicissitudes of repression and emancipation, historical and social problems’, but this examination cannot help an actor to confront his (her) energy (Barba 1987, p. 237). Risking condescension, he admits that his observations on Anima-energy and Animus-energy may appear ‘exotic’ and ‘bizarre’ to those who have experienced only ‘lifeless’ theatres. I assume that by ‘lifeless’ he means those theatres that do not explore pre-expressivity and are content to be ‘natural’. Emphasizing the ‘invisible’ level on which the Anima and Animus energies operate, Barba compares them to the ‘poles of a magnetic field’, the ‘tension between body and shadow’, and more suggestively, to the ebb and flow of waves (personified in the Roman goddesses Venila and Selacia) that blend into one another with the same ‘force’ and ‘substance’, but with a different ‘direction’ and ‘quality’. It is difficult not to be seduced by these images, but perhaps, we should heed Barba’s own advice in Brecht ’s Ashes and resist seduction. It would seem to me that in evoking the ‘invisible’ power of energy, Barba etherealizes it. He detaches it from any resonance of social reality. In the process, his theory becomes less emblematic of a ‘floating island’, which survives precariously on the waters of this earth, and becomes more closely linked to the island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels—an abstract, conceptual entity that floats in the air, lost in metaphysical and technical speculations. Barba’s preoccupation with pre-expressivity seems excessively precious. Does it really matter whether Katsuko Azuma’s principle of life can be described as a’centre of gravity, which is found at a midpoint of a line which travels from the navel to the coccyx?’ (Barba 1986, p. 15). This may be a ‘useful’ insight for her as a performer, but I have to believe that there must be other aspects from her culture, from her being alive as a woman at a particular point in history, that contribute to this principle of life, even on a pre-expressive level. If I did not believe this to be possible, then Katsuko Azuma would cease to be a woman. She would be an anatomy. Once again, it is difficult to accept Barba’s violent separation of the expressive from the pre-expressive, the daily from the extra-daily levels of energy. This is not to dismiss his deep fascination with the ‘invisible’ in theatre, that innermost core of energy ‘which pulses in immobility and silence’. But why can’t this energy exist in a ‘natural’ performance with all the so-called trappings of psychology and characterization? Of course, I am aware that there is a great deal

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 61

of ‘bad’ naturalistic acting, where the energies are all too obvious and burdened with motivation. But if I may recall a performance of Uncle Vanya staged in Calcutta, a very staid and muted production from the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad —a naturalistic production that Barba might have dismissed as ‘lifeless’—I found myself ‘fascinated’ by the presence of the old nanny on stage, who just sits in one corner and knits from the beginning of the play till the end. There was more ‘invisible’ energy in this performance than—I regret to say—most of Odin’s performances which I have seen in New York, Calcutta and Bombay. In a production like Marriage with God, whose recognition in the contemporary European theatre needs no comment on my part, I nonetheless felt that Barba’s actors were working so hard to shape energies through deflection, opposition, collision, transition, metamorphosis and switches of character, that they were overwhelmingly energetic. I was numbed by their virtuosity. But the strangest thing of all is that they left me entirely cold.I was not moved by their particular uses of the body. Iben Nagel Rasmussen may be one of the most technically accomplished actresses in the European theatre today. She is certainly one of the most dedicated performers I have ever seen; her sincerity is visible. But she is no longer in touch with what Barba describes as ‘vulnerability’. Watching her ‘martyrdom’ on stage, I realized why Grotowski stopped doing theatre after a time, and why he so enigmatically decided to take a ‘Holiday’. In his own way, Barba has continued where Grotowski stopped in his exploration of a psychophysical acting. And in this process, he has created through actors like Rasmussen, not a body-in-life (which is the ‘living’ embodiment of the actor’s presence), but rather, a heightened and essentially lifeless state of virtuosity. At the risk of emphasizing the banal in theatre, I must affirm the need to see human beings on stage, however much they may ‘deform’ their bodies in the interest of their ‘presence’. Apart from his fascination with extra-daily modes of behaviour, Barba seems enamoured by the ‘phenomenology of thought’ that he discerns in Oriental theatre, which reflects, in his words, ‘our epoch’s most complex concepts of time and space’, the sub-atomic world of Niels Bohr rather than Newton’s universe (Barba, ‘Eurasian Theatre’, p. 6). What he fails to acknowledge is that this ‘phenomenological’ artistry is also palpable and comprehensible to the spectators on an emotional level. In his seeming fear of expressing or eliciting emotions. Barba edits performance scores through intricate constructs and discontinuities. His theatre becomes a laboratory for very initiated spectators, who are capable of ‘following or accompanying an actor in the dance of thought-in-action’ (Barba, ‘Eurasian Theatre’, p. 7). Let me qualify that my critique of Barba’s theatre, particularly of its arcane qualities and preoccupation with extra-daily behaviour, is directly rooted in my own position as a theatre person living in India. In a country with a vast range of traditional performances and a ‘modern’ theatre that became ‘professional’ only in the second half of the nineteenth century, still in the process of exploring realism and the possibilities of the proscenium, I resist the equation of ‘Indian

62 THE THEATRE OF MIGRANTS

Theatre’ with those ‘traditional’ laws of pre-expressivity and extra-daily behaviour that seem to preoccupy Barba. Certainly, I am aware of the traps of realism and the limits of proscenium, but I believe that there are possibilities contained within them that Barba has assumed and rejected. The point is that he can afford to reject this theatre of ‘daily behaviour’ because it has evolved in his culture over a long period of time. Whether I like it or not, I cannot afford to do so. I am compelled to question the colonial ‘roots’ of realism in the Indian theatre and to see how it has incorporated ‘indigenous’ material and modes of expression. Most contemporary Indian theatre workers are not linked to specific schools of traditional performance. At one level, this is a tragic outcome of our urbanization and colonial education, but it is also a reality that has to be faced. If we have to use our tradition in a meaningful way, we have to develop attitudes to it that are both ‘useful’ to our lives and work, and yet respectful of its context. To my mind, the extra-daily techniques of traditions like Kathakali, Chhau, Yakshagana are too intricate and deeply embedded in specific training processes, for us to ‘use’ in a responsible way. Natyadharmi, the repository of extra-daily behaviour, requires intense ‘specialization’, to use Barba’s term. Perhaps, it is more likely that our contemporary theatre could find more cogent sources of inspiration in lokadharmi, whose possibilities of representing ‘reality’ and levels of abstraction are totally ignored by Barba and most theatre directors in India today. I state these views to locate my own position as a theatre person in a particular historical process. Though Barba speaks of ‘our epoch’, I think we have to differentiate our needs through our positions in this epoch, which vary significantly in Denmark and India. Our differences of history cannot be subsumed in a ‘tradition of traditions’ that cuts across all national, temporal and spatial barriers. Certainly, Barba’s views on pre-expressivity and extra-daily behaviour may inspire stimulating thoughts and points of departure, but essentially, they are of no ‘use’ to me. They are ‘bits of good advice’ that need not be pursued. I cannot end this essay, however, without dwelling on a very significant part of Barba’s life that is of great ‘use’ to me, even though he may have left it behind himself. I am referring to the so-called middle period of Odin’s work, when the group decided to leave its ‘ghetto’ in Holstebro in the spring of 1974 and settle in the village of Carpignano in southern Italy. After having secluded themselves for almost ten years, producing four productions with the strictest rigour and absence of compromise, notably Min Fars Hus (My Father’s House), a play dedicated to Dostoyevsky, the Odin was prepared to face a totally different kind of social interaction with the ‘outer world’. After having confronted its ‘internal socialization’, as Ferdinando Taviani puts it, it was now in a position to ‘react appropriately to different situations’. It was ‘because of and not ‘in spite of its isolation that it was ready to enter this second phase of socialization through interactions with unknown audiences (Barba 1986, p. 268).

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 63

‘Like crabs who have lost the shelter of their shells’: this is how Barba described his actors in Italy as they discovered a new vulnerability as individuals and as a group (ibid., p. 178). In facing their own strangeness as actors in ‘regions without theatre’, they were compelled to redefine themselves and explore a ‘new humility’. ‘Be a stranger who dances’, is the advice they got from their director. When one is a stranger in a foreign country, the most tempting thing to do is to become a tourist, so that one’s insecurities can be submerged within the organization of a tour. Or else, one can try and cover up one’s strangeness by empathizing with the ‘natives’, asserting warm feelings of camaraderie and fraternity. Nothing could have been more difficult for the Odin actors, who tend to be reserved and serious. Nor could they pose as ethologists collecting valuable facts of information. This specious objectivity would have been hard to sustain. Finally, they were not missionaries or philanthropists, who were in the villages to ‘solve’ problems and ‘educate’ the people. Perhaps, as Barba realized, it was best to accept themselves as ‘foreign body’, a ‘tribe’ that rows from one bank of the river to the other side in order to exchange something with another tribe. When the two tribes meet, there is giveand-take and a recognition of each other’s needs. What matters is not what they exchange—it could be shells or beads, ‘salt money’ without any intrinsic value. As Taviani puts it, the very act of exchange gives value to what is exchanged, not the other way around. In this sense, the ‘exchange’ is more than a ‘barter’ in purely economic terms—one cow for three goats, a sack of potatoes for a lamb. In the purely theatrical conception of ‘barter’, there can be no ‘pre-established value for what one exchanges’. The exchange is valuable in itself (ibid.). This radical conception of ‘theatre as barter’ could be meaningfully adapted, to my mind, in countries like India, where some of our rural performers are still paid through donations of rice and grain by the spectators. What needs to be explored is the concept of performers from distinct social and linguistic groups performing for each other in the spirit of a ‘barter’. Most dynamic of all would be the possibility of spectators (and not just performers) participating in the ‘barter’ through their own songs and stories. In fact, Barba first developed the idea of ‘barter’, when an improvised performance by his group at an open square in Lecce was greeted not with a round of applause, but with songs sung by the spectators themselves. In this exchange between Scandinavian folk songs and Italian work songs, ‘barter’ was born. Apart from songs, Odin’s actors realized that their identities could be most meaningfully conveyed through their training exercises. They had persisted in doing these exercises every day, getting up at five in the morning, exactly the same time that the peasants went to work in the fields. After having exposed the people to the ‘logic’ of their work, Odin’s actors were stimulated to improvise these exercises so that they evolved into ‘dances’. No longer sequestered within the confines of their laboratory, they could now expose their process as actors in open spaces. One can believe Barba when he

64 THE THEATRE OF MIGRANTS

says that it would have been hard to recognize his actors in their new surroundings. In their performances for villagers, they had ‘taken on a new skin’, learning to deal with interruptions, infusion of ‘disorderly’ behaviour, laughter, even misunderstanding. Vulnerable, yet true to themselves, part of a group and yet solitary, ‘They moved forward as if they wanted to become human’ (ibid., p. 178). There is an odd poignance in these words, a suggestion of ‘unease’, which is one of Odin’s permanent characteristics. They never quite fit in wherever they are; they hold on to their ‘foreignness’, even while participating with strangers. In fact, as Barba emphasizes, it is the difference between people in a’barter’ that becomes the measure of their meeting. Certainly, one never senses an advocacy of fraternity in Barba. Camaraderie is as alien to him as nostalgia. In all his writings about Odin in Italy, there is never the suggestion of a ‘homecoming’. Rather, Barba sees the problems of the Italian people squarely—their poverty resulting from a ‘meagerly industrialized agriculture’, their ceaseless emigration to foreign countries, the rift between the old and the young, the general aura of decay. Significantly, instead of seeing himself as an emigrant, it is the ‘village’ itself that appears to be one in its disowning of the past and loss of identity. Very tentatively, Barba begins to confront the social situation, but within the context of ‘barter’. When young people assert that they do not know the songs of their region, which could be exchanged for Odin’s performances, Barba encourages them to ‘seek out the old people’, who could be invited to participate in the ‘barter’ (ibid., p. 171). Without being fully aware of it, he begins to function as a catalyst in initiating new relationships between differing groups in a community. Significantly, when his ‘altruism’ is questioned by a journalist, Barba is perfectly frank. At one level, he admits that he is ‘egotistical’ insofar as he wishes to explore a ‘new work situation’, but he also believes that Odin’s presence is ‘useful’ insofar as it stimulates people to ‘rediscover their common cultural ties’ (ibid., p. 158). At no point in his career, to my mind, has Barba thought about theatre with a greater social consciousness. Not content to work within the limits of ‘barter’, he questions: ‘Can one go further? Can one transform the “barter” from a cultural phenomenon into something that will leave a mark on the political and social situation of the place?’ (ibid., p. 176). This is a truly dynamic question, and Barba confronts it through action. Modifying his early position that it is the exchange that matters and not the specific objects that give value to the exchange, Barba now begins to solicit specific objects of exchange from his audience in response to the particular needs of the community. In Monteiasi, Odin is approached by a group of young people who need books in order to start a public library. Barba requests his audience to ‘pay’ for Odin’s dances by donating a book. In Gavoi, a group of ‘leftist’ workers and shepherds want to document the lives of workers in a neighbouring factory. Once again, Barba requests his audience to cooperate with the workers by providing the

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 65

necessary information about their living conditions. In Ollolai, another ‘barter’ is initiated on the basis of a specific need—the organization of a small archive of local traditions that would include old musical instruments, legends and biographies. In all these cases, one senses theatre’s capacity to respond to social needs on the most creative (and utilitarian) levels of exchange. One should not dismiss them as naive. And yet, Barba’s doubt deepens. On the one hand, he is compelled to question how theatre can ‘tangibly’ affect something which is ‘outside of theatre’. But he is also apprehensive about the break in the ‘wall’, which permits such concrete effects. The ‘wall’ of their theatre is what ‘divides’ and ‘protects’ his actors. ‘Trying always to break out’, Barba believes, ‘we run the risk of losing our way’ (ibid.). It seems to me that it is precisely this doubt that has restricted the transformative power of Odin’s work. Just when one imagines that it is in a position to deepen its social significance, it falls back on its ‘asociality’. No concept has received a more intimate rendering by Barba than his understanding of the ‘asocial’. It has inspired some of his most visionary writing, essentially personal, and yet detached, almost meditative in its flow of aphorisms. Situating the ‘asocial’ within the context of emigration, Barba asks some disturbing questions: What immigrant does not dream at one time or another of abandoning his compatriots, of becoming a citizen of the country he is crossing and to which he does not belong? Who does not lend an ear to the voices that invite him to the sad peace of self-betrayal? How often has he who renounces these dreams been branded by the same accusation: ‘asocial’? (ibid., p. 210) Barba then elaborates on the necessity of being ‘asocial’, which could be the sign of ‘the deepest commitment to change’. Through ‘asociality’, one can counter the ‘sociality of injustice’; one can also resist the ‘rules of the games’; one can build ‘one’s own microscopic a-society to test the life one aspires to’; one can transmit ‘one’s presence and action to those who may tomorrow confront themselves with our experiences’ (ibid., pp. 210–11). Being ‘asocial’ does not mean that one is selfish and preoccupied entirely with the present. It involves struggle and resistance, and oddly, it is political in its own right. ‘What is politics?’ asks Barba. ‘Is it not the art of the possible?’ ‘To be “asocial” means to realize one’s own possible’ (ibid., p. 211). One can accept the appropriateness of ‘asociality’ to the first stage of socialization in theatre when actors encounter each other within a group. After all, it was only by being ‘asocial’ in an essentially negative and compromising environment that Odin could develop its own social identity. But what about the

66 THE THEATRE OF MIGRANTS

second stage of a group’s activity, when it enters into relationships with people, just as Odin did in Ollolai, Gavoi and Monteiasi? How can one return to ‘asociality’ after initiating these relationships? A logical answer to the question would be that actors have to act, not get involved with the sponsorship of libraries and archives. An actor’s dharma involves training and performing, which requires particular conditions of life and work. In the case of Odin’s theatre, seclusion and solitude continue to be necessary. ‘Asociality’ is what keeps them going and makes them ‘useful’. But do the two stages of socialization have to be so resistant to each other? Can they not be interdependent? Does one have to live in a ‘ghetto’ in order to preserve one’s identity? At the first Third Theatre Encounter in Belgrade in 1976, Barba had to defend the ‘ghetto’, when its validity as a means of survival was rejected by some groups. To ‘refuse’ the ‘ghetto’ seemed almost suicidal to Barba, especially for those groups discriminated against by society. Upholding the value of the ‘ghetto’ in Theatre Culture’, Barba designates it as the sanctuary of ‘one’s culture, language and religious beliefs’ (ibid., p. 187). Outside the ‘ghetto’, one can find ‘acceptance’, but at the cost of one’s distinctness. In attempting to be ‘free’, one merely imprisons oneself in a society that has fewer liberties than those available in the ‘ghetto’. Most emphatically, Barba stresses that the ‘ghetto’ can mean separation from neighbours, but not ‘from society, from history, from the most significant transformations of one’s own era’ (ibid., p. 198). He mentions that Aristotle and Hippocrates were translated in the ‘ghetto’, which was also the place where the maps were charted and instruments invented. The ‘ghetto’ was a place of learning. But the ghetto, I would counter, was also a place of fear and torture, of indiscriminate violence and liquidation. In attempting to create possibilities out of negative situations (wherein lies his particular gift as a director), Barba sometimes fails to acknowledge the depth of horror in such situations. It is almost as if the image matters more to him than the reality underlying it. For instance, in the central image of his theatre—floating islands—there is surely an element of euphoria underlying the hard reality. When the Toltecs allowed the Aztecs to settle on a few islands in Lake Texacoco, the Aztecs survived by eating poisonous snakes and building rafts of reeds. But the Uro, who built floating islands on Lake Titicaca, had to endure a more animal-like existence. Yet, they survive, as Barba points out, but at what cost? Surely it is somewhat disingenuous on Barba’s part to invoke such images of survival today, when he heads a $250,000, state-supported Teaterlaboratorium, which includes a number of ‘autonomous’ groups (like Odin Teatret, FARFA, the Canadian Project), and which is the centre of the most sophisticated research in theatre today. After a twenty-year struggle, it is obvious that the ‘ghetto’ of Odin’s early work has been transformed into an Institute. Certainly, it continues to have active ties with Third Theatre groups all over the world; their barters and meetings continue but the focus of Barba’s ‘research’ seems to be getting

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 67

increasingly theoretical. The formulation of theatre’s ‘anthropology’ seems to concern him more than the social relationships engendered through interactions with audiences. Of course, this ‘development’ from the ‘ghetto’ to the Institute was inevitable. One should even applaud Barba’s insistence that a ‘subculture’ should transform itself into a ‘culture’ in order to withstand the stigma of marginalization. Most ‘alternatives’ never seem to last long enough to transcend their ‘subcultural’ status. Those that do invariably become part of the establishment. Is ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, part of the new establishment? Have the floating islands become part of the mainland? It would not seem so at first glance. The ‘centre’ continues to decentralize its activities and to sponsor seminars and projects that lie outside of commercial interests and sources of funding. Its research, however arcane and decontextualized from history, sociology and politics, resists the conservative trends in western theatre academia. But undeniably, the essential priorities of the organization have changed. Having survived its struggle, it can now afford to promote its pedagogy and vision. The cultures of the world are more accessible to Odin today. Consequently, it has acquired a new power to alter perception of the theatre, and more critically, to alter perspectives of the world through theatre. Given the nature of ISTA’s research, its preoccupation with concepts and practices relating to ‘pre-expressivity’ and ‘extra-daily behaviour’, one cannot deny that the most stimulating material for its research has come from nonwestern cultures. What, I ask, is Barba’s commitment to these cultures? Surely his ‘fascination’ is not enough. How does he hope to deepen his relationships with these cultures if, as he emphasized in a theatre conference in Bombay, it is not possible to ‘understand another culture’? Does that mean he has no responsibility to use these cultures in ways that are appropriate to their own performative, social and spiritual contexts? Are these cultures ‘useful’ only as points of departure? I ask these questions not to deny Barba’s significance, but to reflect on his use of my culture (among other non-western cultures) in the interests of his own growth. I cannot readily accept his constructs of ‘transculturalism’, ‘Eurasian theatre’, and the ‘tradition of traditions’, in which performance traditions from the ‘Orient’ are so hospitably accommodated. Not only is it necessary to question the ‘invisible’ affiliations that seem to unite disparate cultures on a pre-expressive level, one also needs to ask how these cultures are transported and what happens to their representation once they are placed in the alien context of seminars and conferences. Though Barba embodies an ethical attitude to theatre, I cannot share his blithe assumption that ‘every ethnocentricity has its eccentric pole, which reinforces and compensates for it’ (Barba, ‘Eurasian Theatre’, p. 2). For my own part, I must stress that the eccentricities of ethnocentricity can no longer be tolerated because they have been so destructive to non-western cultures. If Barba believes that a ‘profound necessity’ can become a ‘social action’, I can only hope that the necessity of his using non-western cultures will not be at

68 THE THEATRE OF MIGRANTS

the expense of confronting their historical immediacies. Perhaps it would be best for him to recall the ‘disappearance of cultures’ evoked in his own production of Come! And the Day Will be Ours, where ‘one man destroys another in the name of values which he believes to be universal’ (Barba 1986, p. 184). There are no universal values in the theatre. There are only personal needs which get transformed into social and political actions, rooted in the individual histories of theatre. It is unlikely that Barba would want his theatre to acquire a’universal’ significance. His faith in individuals and singular visions remains strong. But in his theorizing of cultures on a ‘transcultural’ level, there is a universalizing tendency that diffuses the historical differences permeating forms, resulting in a Eurasian encapsulation of ‘laws’ and ‘rules of behaviour’. Barba’s theory can be seen as the domestication of his life as a migrant. It is the alter ego of a man destined to travel from place to place, from one source of knowledge to another, always foreign, always slightly ill at ease with the world around him. It is useless to ask Barba when he is going to return home. Perhaps his ‘home’ is the nucleus of his work where the cultures of the world can meet in his deeply subjective vision. Though this vision is not mine, there is much to admire and respect about its intricacies and resilience. Ultimately, it is Barba’s combination of insight and tenacity that has enabled him to transform limitations into possibilities, rejections into affirmations. His sound piece of advice, among many others, is always with me, even as I end this essay. You cannot choose ideas in the hope that they will change you. You must choose conditions of life and work. REFERENCES Barba, Eugenio (1986), Beyond the Floating Islands, ‘Postscript’ by Ferdinando Taviani, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. —— (1987), ‘The Actor’s Energy: Male/Female versus Animus/Anima’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. III, No. 11, August 1987. —— ‘Eurasian Theatre’, typescript copy provided by Eugenio Barba. Bassnett, Susan (1987), ‘Perceptions of the Female Role: The ISTA Congress’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. III, No. 11, August 1987. Munk, Erika (1986), ‘The Rites of Women’, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. X, No. 2.

Chapter 4 Peter Brook’s Mahabharata A view from India

Peter Brook’s Mahabharata exemplifies one of the most blatant (and accomplished) appropriations of Indian culture in recent years. Very different in tone from the Raj revivals, it nonetheless suggests the bad old days of the British Raj, not in its direct allusions to colonial history—the Mahabharata, after all, deals with our ‘ancient’ past, our ‘authentic’ record of traditional Hindu culture. For Brook’s Vyasa, it is nothing less than ‘the poetical history of mankind’. Within such a grandiose span of time, where does the Raj fit? Not thematically or chronologically, I would argue, but through the very enterprise of the work itself: its appropriation and reordering of non-western material within an orientalist framework of thought and action, which has been specifically designed for the international market. It was the British who first made us aware in India of economic appropriation on a global scale. They took our raw materials from us, transported them to factories in Manchester and Lancashire, where they were transformed into commodities, which were then forcibly sold to us in India. Brook deals in a different kind of appropriation: he does not merely take our commodities and textiles and transform them into costumes and props. He has taken one of our most significant texts and decontextualized it from its history in order to ‘sell’ it to audiences in the West. Though we may not be aware of it, our government ‘bought’ this appropriation of our culture through its official support of the production in Europe and America. It continued to support the production in Japan as part of its promotion of ‘festival culture’ throughout the world. At one time, there was some speculation that it would be staged in India itself—where else but on the banks of the Ganges. But that proved to be too expensive, so Doordarshan, our government’s most ubiquitous propagandist of ‘national culture’, co-sponsored a film version of the production which was shown in a few Indian cities in December 1989. The screening of the film was accompanied by workshops and demonstrations conducted by Brook and members of his company for Indian theatre workers and artists. This post-production tour of the Mahabharata team could be written about at length, but for the purpose of this essay, one could simply emphasize that it was cast in the tradition of the great Durbars of colonial India in which royal

70 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

dignitaries from England were honoured by maharajas and the cultural elite. Predictably, Brook was accompanied everywhere by an entourage of VIPs and government officials. The forums themselves were not open to the general public but to invited audiences whose ‘credentials’ had been screened through questionnaires distributed by local theatre groups and impresarios appointed by the government. Needless to say, most of the sessions were received respectfully, and at times, with an overdose of deference. The dissent, if any, was silenced or voiced outside of the seminars. Most problematic of all factors was the money spent on Brook’s tour which is said to have cost more than the annual cultural budget made available to all performing artists and groups in India. It is obvious that this five-star funding (in addition to the government support of the film) was totally out of proportion to what was received. Indeed, one is compelled to question what people in India received from a theatre production they never got to see. One could dismiss Brook’s enterprise were it not for the scale of its operation and the magnitude of its effect. The production itself was hailed at its very inception by The Sunday Times as ‘one of the theatrical events of this century’ by a reviewer who, I assume, is both very old and omniscient. ‘Enthralled audiences’ have watched this ‘landmark of our times’, imagining it to be a truthful adaptation of ‘a classic Indian epic’. Actually, the very association of the Mahabharata with western assumptions of the ‘epic’ minimizes its importance. The Mahabharata is not merely a great narrative poem; it is our itihasa, the fundamental source of knowledge of our literature, dance, painting, sculpture, theology, statecraft, sociology, economy—in short, our history in all its detail and density. Instead of confronting this history with his international group of actors in Paris (of whom Mallika Sarabhai is the only Indian participant), Brook has created a so-called ‘story’ of the Mahabharata in association with Jean-Claude Carrière. This ‘story’ reads, in my view, like a rather contrived and overblown fairy-tale, not unlike their trite adaptation of a twelfth-century Sufi poem of Farid-ud-din Attar in The Conference of the Birds. The significant difference in the adaptations is one of scale; if Conference resembles an oriental version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in its hour-long summary of 5,000 philosophical verses, the Mahabharata is nothing less than The Ten Commandments of contemporary western theatre. At one level, there is not much one can do about stopping such productions. After all, there is no copyright on the Mahabharata (does it belong to India alone? Or is it an Indian text that belongs to the world?) I am not for a moment suggesting that westerners should be banned from touching our sacred texts. I am neither a fundamentalist nor an enthusiast of our very own Ramanand Sagar’s serialization of the Ramayana on Doordarshan every Sunday morning. Certainly, we are capable of misrepresenting the epics ourselves. All I wish to assert is that the Mahabharata must be seen on as many levels as possible within the Indian context, so that its meaning (or rather, multiple levels of meaning) can have

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 71

some bearing on the lives of the Indian people for whom the Mahabharata was written, and who continue to derive their strength from it. If Brook truly believes that the epic is universal, then his representation should not exclude or trivialize Indian culture, as I believe it does. One cannot agree with the premise that ‘The Mahabharata is Indian but it is universal’. The ‘but’ is misleading. The Mahabharata, I would counter, is universal because it is Indian. One cannot separate the culture from the text. Having emphasized the contextual necessity for any representation of the Mahabharata, I should stress that I am not critical of Brook’s production because it is ‘western’. What disturbs me is that it exemplifies a particular kind of western representation which negates the non-western context of its borrowing. Of course, one has to accept that Brook has not grown up with the epic in his childhood, unlike most Indians, who have internalized the Mahabharata through a torrent of emotions, thoughts, taboos, concepts and fantasies. It is this internalization of ‘epic reality’ that enables millions of Indians to watch a television serial of the Ramayana—synthetic, tacky, sticky in the worst tradition of Hindu films—and transform this representation into a deeply spiritual experience. I do not expect such a transformation to take place either in Brook or his audience, who have not grown up with Hindu faith, strengthened through a knowledge (often unconscious) of dharma, karma, moksha and other spiritual concepts and values. Inevitably, any western director of the Mahabharata needs to define his own attitude or configuration of attitudes to the epic. He needs to ask: what does this epic mean to me? But this question, I believe, can be responsibly addressed only after the meaning (or meanings) of the Mahabharata have been confronted within their own cultural context. If this is not possible, if the context remains elusive or bizarre, then the director should not dramatize the epic. Rather, he should focus his attention on his own cultural artefacts, the epics of western civilization like the Iliad or the Odyssey, which he is more likely to understand. I should also add that if he represented these epics to audiences in the West, he would also be more accountable for his actions and interpretation. He would not be able to get away with his misrepresentation of ‘other’ cultures. Brook, however, never once admitted in his numerous interviews and comments on the Mahabharata that the Indian context of the ‘epic’ posed a problem. In fact, the context is never an issue for him. What matters is the ‘flavour of India’ that is suggested through the mise-en-scène. At one level, this might seem appropriately modest: a ‘flavour’, after all, does not seem so important as the ‘substance’. But in actuality, nothing could be harder in the theatre than to represent the ‘flavour’ of another culture. If Brook had been sufficiently aware of the numerous metaphors of cooking that have been used in the Natyasastra and other aesthetic commentaries on the rasa (literally ‘taste’) of a performance, he might have used the word with more caution. ‘Flavour’ is not some mystical aura that emanates from a culture. It is the outcome of a process wherein specific

72 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

ingredients have been seasoned and blended with spices in particular combinations. The ‘flavour’ of Indian culture has a definite context. It is what differentiates a curry from a stew, and I’m not just referring to the taste, but to the entire history of a people that shapes taste in particular ways. When Brook says in the Foreword to his play that ‘we have tried to suggest the flavour of India without pretending to be what we are not’, he is gracefully evading a confrontation with the historical context of Indian culture. No one wants Brook to resort to antiquarianism. When he claims that ‘we are not attempting a reconstruction of Dravidian and Aryan India of 3000 years ago’, we can accept that position. But when, in the next line, he says, ‘We are not presuming to present the symbolism of Hindu philosophy’, this qualification is more questionable (Carrière 1987, p. xvi). What is the Mahabharata without Hindu philosophy? Apart from Krishna (whose representation I will deal with later), Brook gives us vignettes of Ganesh, Siva, Hanuman; some bleak predictions about the end of the world; a scattering of references to dharma; and a five-minute encapsulation of the Bhagavad Gita. It did not come as a surprise to me when the audience laughed on hearing Krishna’s famous advice to Arjuna: ‘Act, but don’t reflect on the fruits of the action’ (ibid., p. 159). If the New York audience laughed, it is not because their own ideology of capitalism and self-interest had been called into question. Krishna’s statement came out of the blue without any depth of meaning or resonance. What could have been a moment of revelation was reduced to a banality. The problem is that there is no framework of reference in Brook’s production that provides a Hindu perspective of action in the larger, cosmic context. No wonder all the characters seem to act arbitrarily, or else under the instigation of Krishna. There is no clear sense of what the characters are compelled to do by virtue of their swadharma, or life task. Dharma remains an abstraction in the production, evoking neither ‘law on which rests the order of the world’, nor the ‘personal and secret order each human being recognizes as his own’ (ibid., p. xii). Even these generalities of dharma (as defined by Carrière in his preface to the play) would be acceptable, though a more rigorous adaptation of the Mahabharata would need to represent a character’s swadharma according to: desa kala srama gunas

the culture is which a person is born the period of historic time in which he lives the efforts required of him at different stages of the life the innate psychobiological traits which are the heritage of an individual’s previous lives

All these ‘co-ordinates of action’ as defined by Sudhir Kakar in The Inner World (Kakar 1982, p. 37) are conspicuous by their absence in Brook’s conception of character. Or else they are travestied through: a mish-mash of cultures with an

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 73

overriding aura of ‘Indianness’; a total avoidance of historicity, of the social transformation underlying the Mahabharata from a tribal to a Brahmindominated caste society; a monochromatic presentation of characters with no sense of their evolution through different stages in life; and lastly a failure to suggest that this life is just part of a series of rebirths, relivings of past transgressions that can cease only through moksha. Not once in the production does one sense that these characters could have lived previous lives (with the exception of Sikhandin, whose transformation is all too obvious). Nor is there a strong sense of what lies beyond this life; the pyrotechnics on stage and the religiosity of the theatrical atmosphere (particularly when Kunti evokes the three Gods to give birth to her sons) convey, at best, a sense of the supernatural. In the absence of any defined religious framework, it is only inevitable that the characters seem to share the Christian universe of their audience—a lapsed Christianity, perhaps, neither fervent nor cynical, but one which nevertheless continues to assume that there is a definite beginning and end to life, a Heaven and a Hell. When the fire burns on the stage and there is an aura of incense and marigolds, these are merely oriental touches. Perhaps another reason for the conceptual fuzziness of the production has to do with the absence of caste distinctions, without which the actions of the characters cannot be fully clarified. Indian characters do not merely act according to their feelings (which is what Brook’s characters appear to do), but in accordance to how they are expected to act by virtue of their dharma, which in turn is determined by caste. We hear of kshatriyas in Brook’s production, and we see them fight, but we do not learn much about the ethos of their caste. For Brook, the action of fighting is predominantly external; it does not resonate an inner code of values, unlike the samurai in Kurosawa’s films, who register a complete way of living and being through their gestures and stillness. Carrière needs to do much more than to retain the Indian word kshatriya to withstand the ‘colonization by vocabulary’ (Carrière 1987, p. xii). He needs to evoke kshatriyadharma through language, gestures and sentiment in a way that transcends the image of the Pandavas and Kauravas as ‘warriors’. As for Brahmins, we learn only through inference that the irascible Parashurama is one, even though he is described vaguely as an ‘extraordinary hermit’ who ‘felled twenty-one generations of kshatriyas with his axe’ (ibid., p. 110). Why? one never knows. And then there is Drona, whose Brahminical status is known only before he dies, when Dhrishthadyumna confronts Aswatthaman. How Drona’s ritual status contradicted his early poverty, and how he was rejected by his Kshatriya friend, King Drupada, is never touched on in the production. In fact, Drupada is never mentioned even by name, and Dhrishthadyumna appears only at the end as an apparition, whose relationship to his sister Draupadi is never acknowledged. If the caste distinctions had been retained in the production, they would surely have enhanced the relationships that exist between friends. Krishna and Arjuna, who belong to the same caste, share an intimacy (not explored in the production)

74 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

that Duryodhana and Karna can never hope to share. As a suta, the adopted son of a charioteer, Karna will always be dependent on Duryodhana’s magnanimity. His friendship will always be conditioned by servility. I don’t think that Brook’s audience had a clue about the intensity of Karna’s humiliation as a suta, because he was never differentiated from the Pandavas or the Kauravas on the level of caste. True, he does refer to himself as the ‘son of a driver’, but the rupture in his ritual status, and his consequent rejection of this status, have no resonance beyond the obvious fact that he has been wronged. Karna’s dilemma seems entirely personal; it is not situated within the social and ritual structure of Hindu society, with its accompanying tensions and constraints. My focus on caste distinctions may appear to be pedantic to the western spectators of Brook’s production. But how does one react to their laughter when Yudhisthira is prevented from entering Heaven because of his companion —a dog? To the average westerner, a dog is merely a pet; it is not associated with pollution. Its presence is not likely to desecrate a sacrificial offering or puja. But to the average Hindu, the significance of Yudhisthira’s insistence on entering the Kingdom of heaven with a dog is profound. His humanity is lost in Brook’s production, because there is no context in which to place his seemingly sacrilegious demand. At this point, I should stress that it was not impossible for Brook to suggest the Hindu context of significant gestures and relationships. There is at least one relationship in the production that is rooted in the Indian context: the gurushishya parampara. After demonstrating Arjuna’s allegiance to Drona, Brook inserts a masterful scene, barely ten minutes long, in which a ‘minor’ character called Ekalavya offers himself to Drona as a shishya. The guru rejects him. Undaunted, Ekalavya retreats to the forest where he worships an idol of Drona (played by Drona himself), and perfects his archery so that he can pierce ‘seven arrows in the jaws of a dog in the span of a single bark’ (ibid., p. 31). Drona discover his skills and demands his gurudakshina—nothing less than Ekalavya’s thumb on his right hand. The shishya obliges and leaves, his skills destroyed forever. Is this ‘cruelty’ or ‘foresight’? The representation of this scene indicates that it is possible for Brook to illuminate the Indian context of a particular relationship. He achieves this by juxtaposing the attitudes of Arjuna and Ekalavya to Drona, so that we can sense the interplay of authority and obedience in the traditional teacher-student relationship. The scene works because of the thought contained within it, at once deftly dramatized and sharply punctuated within the mainstream of the narrative. It interrupts the relentless flow of action, where there is almost no lingering on details and episodes. In Ekalavya’s absence, the ‘story’ could have gone on, but his presence is what provides the play with one of its moments of meaningful exchange. If Brook had been concerned with the context of the Mahabharata, he might not have attempted to summarize the entire ‘story’ within nine hours. For an ‘epic’ that is fifteen times longer than the Bible, nine hours is really not that

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 75

long; in fact, it is pitifully short. To attempt an encapsulation of the Mahabharata in its entirety is a hubris of sorts, but to limit that encapsulation to nine hours is the reductio ad absurdum of theatrical adaptation. It would have been better for Brook to focus on a few scenes. In India a Kathakali or Koodiyattam performance would need approximately nine hours to dramatize a single episode from the text, perhaps one of the anecdotes in Brook’s production in which we learn, for instance, about how Ganesh got an elephant head. The purpose of traditional performances is not to tell a story from beginning to end, but to dwell on specific moments in the story, so that its minutest details can evoke a world of sensations and truth. I am not suggesting Brook should have imitated our traditional performances, whose discipline requires years of training and total dedication. I respect his decision to create his own idiom of theatre and acting, but I regret that it has not absorbed some of the fundamental principles underlying traditional narratives in India. Without an understanding of these principles, I don’t believe that the narratives make sense. Unlike the ‘West’, where there is no performance tradition that has come down to us from antiquity, where the most definitive treatise on Greek theatre, the Poetics, has little to say about performance, we in India have a living history of traditional performances and a body of critical writing on acting and aesthetics where the most intricate iconography of performances has been schematized. Unlike contemporary directors of ancient Greek plays, who inevitably run up against problems of representation, a director of any traditional literature related to India has both the advantage of confronting and the responsibility to confront traditional performances within their own aesthetic contexts. The purpose of such confrontation is not to imitate, but to imbibe principles of narration and performance that can inspire significant points of departure. Inevitably, in the absence of such a confrontation, there is no sense of struggle in Brook’s representation of the text; the ‘gigantic undertaking’ is supremely controlled like any big production on Broadway, the material always kept at a safe distance, so that its tensions never ignite. For all the years of work that Brook and Carrière have spent on their chef d’oeuvre, it seems that their impulse has been not to get closer to India, but to distance themselves from it altogether. Significantly, when Brook encountered the Mahabharata for the first time in a Kathakali performance, he admits that after the ‘unforgettable shock’ of the dancer’s first appearance, he found himself moving away from the performance. The story being told was ‘something mythical and remote, from another culture, nothing to do with my life’ (ibid., p. xiii). While appreciating the honesty of this response, I wish that Brook could have devoted more time to understanding the ‘hieratic gestures’ of the performance, instead of settling for a more ‘ordinary’ and ‘accessible’ rendition of the same performance. Brook’s inadequate confrontation of Indian tradition was characterized by short cuts. Instead of opening himself to the discomfort and vulnerability of learning the gestures of a tradition (which could have resulted in failure), Brook

76 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

arranged for the tradition to be represented in such a way that he can understand it. He did not enter the ‘jungle’ of the text with its labyrinthine paths and dense growth; rather, he listened to versions of the text, from which he created his own paraphrase. Despite the much-publicized ‘research’ for the project (which Carrière claims received the ‘benediction of saints’, though P. Lal is the only living Indian scholar mentioned by name), it seems to me that very few risks were taken in preparing the script for the production. Accessibility was the determining principle of this adaptation. So dominant was the directorial impulse to engage the western audience’s attention that a dramaturgy was created which made no demand whatsoever on the very act of seeing an epic on stage. For Carrière, the ‘inexhaustible richness’ of the epic ‘defies all structural, thematic, historic or psychological analysis’ (ibid., p. ix). Perhaps, it was with this premise in mind that he reduced the epic to a chronological sequence of episodes that are structurally linked to the well-made play tradition of Scribe and Sardou and the historical chronicles of nineteenthcentury theatre. Vyasa’s epic has been systematized into three parts—The Game of Dice’, ‘Exile in the Forest’, ‘The War’, his intricate structure of story-telling reduced to a line of action. If Brook had given some importance to the cyclical nature of time that pervades the Mahabharata, he would have rejected the validity of dramatizing the epic in a predominantly linear narrative. Nothing could be more foreign to the Mahabharata than linearity. This ‘foreignness’ is not just a formal blunder, it distorts the very meaning of the narrative. Only at rare moments in the production (which are also memorable) did the past coalesce with the present, such as the time when Kunti is visited by the Sun—a flashback that interrupts the sequence where Karna first appears in the tournament. What one misses, however, is a sense of time that transcends chronology, time that stretches into infinity. In his introduction to the play, Carrière pays tribute to this ‘immense poem, which flows with the majesty of a great river’ (ibid., p. ix). And yet, his own flow of words is more like a sputter, the rhythm chopped with mechanical precision. Time is truncated into blocks of action, acts and scenes that have definite beginnings and ends. When Brook’s Krishna says that, ‘He spoke for a long time, a very long time’, in his discourse to Arjuna on the battlefield, we should feel this ‘long time’. In addition, at different points in the production, we should sense the interpenetration of past, present and future, either through imagery or language. In the original text, after Draupadi has been humiliated, the blind Dhritarashtra says: ‘I see the scene right before me now: Long-armed Satyaki dragging and molesting the entire Kaurava army as if it were a weak, helpless woman’ (Chaitanya 1985, p. 42). He is seeing the future on the battlefield, while unconsciously remembering the immediate past (in which Draupadi has been dragged by the hair and molested), and he is registering both these events in the present moment.

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 77

There were no such encapsulations of time in Brook’s production. The narrative always moved forwards with predictable briskness, especially towards the end where the death of Abhimanyu is followed by the deaths of Ghatotkacha, Drona, Dushassana, Karna and Duryodhana in quick succession, one scene for each death, all over in less than three hours. What is the point, I asked myself while watching this saga of action? The battle on Kurukshetra is not the fifth act of Macbeth. There are sentiments, lulls in the action, and deep tragic moments that need to be lingered over for the action to make any sense. Without pauses, intensifications of detail, and patterns of return, this Mahabharata means nothing. It is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. After seeing the production, I was compelled to question whether the ‘story’ of the Mahabharata makes much sense outside of the conventions of storytelling to which it belongs. Can a story be separated from the ways in which it is told to its own people? Indian narratives seem to thrive on circumlocutions whether it is a family quarrel or the plot of a Hindi film, the elaboration is invariably more important than the thrust of the narrative. There is no steady progression in Indian narratives from exposition to complication to climax to denouement, as in ‘the well-made play’. Climaxes are at the very beginning, while the complications invariably stimulate new beginnings. Time never seems to matter—a story lasts for as long as there is a need for it. In this regard, the teller of the story is totally dependent on the participation of the listener, who is invariably vocal and deeply involved in the labyrinthine process of the story which he may already know. Of course, the situation is different for Brook, who is telling the ‘story’ of the Mahabharata to a western audience for the first time. Consequently, one cannot expect any ‘shared experience’ to unite the actors and spectators within the world of the story. But almost all of the characters in Brook’s Mahabharata are presented in outline, with their inner energies and fire missing. Brook seems to use the characters to tell his story, so that they rarely ignite and acquire lives of their own. Most of the characters are so undifferentiated that they almost blend into each other. The ones who stand out are those who assert their energies in solitary splendour. Amba, for instance, is given a thoroughly convincing performance by Helene Patarot in a characterization driven by hate. In her own way, this French actress delved into the sthaibhava of the role to create a revengeful state of being. ‘Hate keeps me young’: we see the very drive of this emotion in Amba’s second exit, as she sloshes her way through the river on stage, her heavy skirt dragging along, in pursuit of Bhishma. Like Amba, the other characters who make a strong impression—Bhima, Karna and the Sun—are played by actors whose energies cut through the triteness of the text. But, for the most part, Brook has failed to provide his actors with modes of representing emotion that belong to the ‘epic’. Apart from some attempts to ‘distance’ the characters through third-person narratives, he settles for a heroic mode of acting that passes off as Shakespearean in the ‘deadly’

78 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

tradition of British theatre. Most of the Mahabharata actors could have been playing Shakespearean roles: Abhimanyu is startlingly similar to Young Siward in his youthful courage: Duryodhana fights like Macbeth, ranting and raving, but he also evokes Richard III in his machiavellian strategies and self-destruction (‘I want to be discontented’); even Arjuna has a moment when he suggests Macduff’s grief on losing his son. Apart from Shakespeareana, Brook uses the colourful and extravagant pantomime tradition for ‘oriental characters’ like Virata, Gudeshna and Kichaka; as for Satyavati’s father, he is straight from the Pirates of Penzance. Apart from simplifying the epic characters within these modes of acting, reducing them at times to the level of cartoons, Brook erases some characters altogether. The contemplative Viruda is cut, because as Carrière claims, ‘His effect on the plot is minor’ (Carrière 1987, p. 10). Very often, a character appears with no background whatsoever, and disappears in a few minutes without providing anything beyond ‘plot development’. One of the most enigmatic of such presences (or rather, absences) is Maya, who introduces himself as the ‘supreme architect’, who wishes to build a palace for the Pandavas—a ‘magic palace…where thoughts become real’ (ibid., p. 46). Instead of indulging in these pretty phrases, Carrière should have given us some clue as to why Maya wants to favour the Pandavas with his skills. The fact is that he is obliged to do so. Maya, an asura or demon, is one of the seven characters who escaped from the Khandava forest, after it was burned down by Agni with the active assistance of Arjuna and Krishna. Obliged to satisfy Agni’s ‘hunger’, these two heroes guard the forest on all sides, preventing every bird, animal and Naga from escaping. Mayasabha, the ‘magic palace’, is built on the ashes of their unpardonable genocide. Even if one accepts that it would have been difficult for Brook to stage the burning of the forest, though a narration of the event would have been chilling in its own right, how can one accept the erasure of context from Maya’s representation? More critically, how can we begin to understand a major character like Kunti if we don’t know anything of her past oppression—the cursory way in which she is handed over by her father to Kuntibhoja, so that she can look after the irascible sage Durvasa like a good hostess. And then, of course, she is married off to Pandu, who is doomed to be impotent. Instead of reflecting some attitude to the circumstances of her life, Brook seems to accept her lot with equanimity. I am not advocating an explicitly feminist reading of Kunti, though many women (both Indian and western) could legitimately demand one. I call into question the seeming neutrality of the entire representation that prevents Brook and Carrière from taking a position in relation to the problems of the text. In the opening sequence of the production, Vyasa claims that his ‘poetical history of mankind’ is as ‘pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted’ (ibid., p. 3). His rhetoric reveals the aura of completion that pervades Brook’s production, an aura that gives the illusion of the ‘epic’ speaking itself with minimal interventions. This view is substantiated by Carrière himself in his introduction to the play, when he

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 79

emphasizes the necessity of entering the ‘deepest places’ of the characters ‘without interposing our concepts, our judgements or our twentieth-century analysis, insofar as this is possible’ (ibid., p. xi). What seems like a very graceful concern for the integrity of the epic is also an evasion of responsibility. Carrière assumes that a perception of the ‘deepest places’ is possible without a critical consciousness. It is almost as if the Mahabharata lies beyond questioning, and that its ‘story’ can be told only through some mystical communion with the work itself. Nothing could be more removed from the truth. If the Mahabharata is very much alive in India today, it is because it has always invited the most turbulent questions from its most ardent supporters. When I stress how the work should be situated in its context, I do not for a moment assume that this context cannot be questioned in relation to our own consciousness today. Take Iravati Karve, one of the most respected interpreters of the text, who is not reluctant to state categorically that ‘the sole aim of the burning of the Khandava forest was the acquisition of land and the liquidation of the Nagas’ (Karve 1974, p. 104). She goes on to judge the event: ‘But the cruel objective was defeated. Just as Hitler found it impossible to wipe out a whole people, so did the Pandavas. All they gained through this cruelty were the curses of hundreds of victims and three generations of enmity’ (ibid., pp. 104–5). Contrary to what some spectators in the West may believe, polyandry is not a common practice in India. Draupadi’s marriage poses problems even in the Indian context. The status of Draupadi, her birth through Yajna-fire, her family and political affiliations, are never clarified in the production, She merely appears early in the play and is promptly shared by the five brothers, because Kunti ‘can’t take back her word’. Draupadi, ‘the paragon of women’, accepts her situation in silence (ibid., p. 38). Commenting on the problem, Buddhadeva Bose says that, ‘Kunti was mortified about adharma when she saw Draupadi’, after giving her word. Yudhisthira, too, encouraged Arjuna to marry her, though this would have resulted in another form of adharma (a younger brother cannot marry first). In addition, Bose emphasizes that Draupadi’s marriage was strongly resisted by her own father, Drupada, who asserts that, ‘The sastras may approve of one man having many wives, but we have never heard of one woman having many husbands’ (Bose 1986, p. 114). All these oppositions and doubts are erased in Brook’s production. His Draupadi accepts her lot because of the mother-inlaw’s word. Nathyavati anathavat: married, but like a widow. This terrible paradox in Draupadi’s life is a source of pain, but it also elicits the deepest questions. What is stirring is that these questions come from Draupadi herself. She argues her own case, rejecting a woman’s traditional silence, and acquires in the process, the reputation of a ‘lady pundit’. Draupadi does not allow her anger to simmer within herself. It explodes in the scene where she is dragged to the assembly, after her first husband has presumed to lose her in a game of dice after losing himself.

80 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

To whom does she belong? Her husband or to herself? To what extent is a wife the slave of her husband? What are the rights of slaves? Does Yudhisthira have more rights over Draupadi than her other husbands? Can the four brothers collectively disown Yudhisthka? The weight of these questions is ignored by Brook in his treatment of the assembly scene where Draupadi is humiliated. When she entreats Bhishma, ‘Can one belong to someone who has lost himself?’ he responds quizzically, ‘I am troubled. The question is obscure’ (Carrière 1987, p. 66). This line gains a tremendous laugh, because not once are we made to feel that Draupadi has been seriously wronged. Brook directs the scene with a fast pace, his eye on the ‘miracle’, when yards of cloth unfold from Draupadi’s robe in the tradition of stage tricks from pantomime, the sea of tears in Alice in Wonderland created through cloth. One never really senses the threat of rape in Dushassana’s handling of Draupadi, and consequently, Krishna’s intervention seems merely obligatory. In the original text, the nakedness of Draupadi is heightened through her dress, a single garment tied around the waist, which is the traditional garb of a woman in her period, a state of ritual pollution. Instead of heightening the outrage inflicted on her, Brook covers it up with facile theatricality. Like the actors on stage, we watch the scene without feeling any need to judge the action. When Draupadi wails, ‘Where is dharma?’ it seems like pointless hysteria, a case of a woman not being able to shut up on time. Draupadi’s lines do not resonate because of Mallika Sarabhai’s monotonous delivery. Though she obviously knows English better than many of the other actors, who are speaking it for the first time on stage in a bewildering range of accents, her own voice never comes through. She speaks as she has been directed to speak, unlike some of the African actors, whose rhythms resist the ‘simple, precise, restrained language’ created by Carrière and translated by Brook. Sarabhai’s energy is somewhat muted, even though she is obviously the only ‘authentic’ Indian presence on stage, with black hair, brown skin and expressive eyes. Unfortunately, her gestures are constrained within a realistic structure of acting, which does not permit any suggestion of Draupadi’s sexuality in the original text. When she approaches Bhima before the killing of Kichaka, she does not merely wake him up in an agitated state, as in Brook’s production. She is subtlety itself in her movement: Like a white-winged female crane of a three-year old forest cow, the bathed and cleansed Draupadi appeared in the kitchen before Bhima, who was like a bull in strength and size. As a creeper climbs and clings around a giant sal tree on the banks of the Gomati, so did she embrace the middle Pandav…. Like a female elephant, she pressed herself upon Bhima, the great elephant, and said in a voice melodious as the veena of a gandhar, ‘Wake up, Bhimsen, wake up’. (Bose 1986, p. 115)

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 81

I quote this passage at length to convey the possibilities of texture in the gestures and movements of Draupadi, so sadly absent in Sarabhai’s performance. Brook does not give her the freedom to dance, the primary constituent of abhinaya. If she could have expressed herself through dance even for a few moments, her culture would have been embodied in the performance. But that’s clearly what Brook didn’t want; it would have become ‘too Indian’. Why assemble an international group of actors if the expressive possibilities of their cultures are negated in the production? The cast includes actors from England, France, Turkey, Japan, Iran, Poland, Italy, South Africa, Senegal, Indonesia and India—an impressive representation, no doubt, the United Nations of Theatre. But what is the point of that if most of the actors’ voices, rhythms and performance traditions have been homogenized within a western structure of action, where they have to speak a language unknown to most of them? Of course, this language has to be either English or French—how could one possibly imagine this Mahabharata in Sanskrit, or for that matter, in any non-western language? What would be harder to question is Brook’s use of one language for the entire production. He has obviously learned from his early experiment on Orghast in Persepolis, for which Ted Hughes created a ‘universal’ language from the sounds and syllables of Greek, Latin and the ritual language of the Zend-Avesta. This ‘pretentious gibberish’ (as Ossia Trilling described Hughes’s ‘adapted language’) is far removed from the chaste English used in the American production of the Mahabharata. In fact, I would be tempted to describe it as the ‘Queen’s English’, it is so proper and grammatically precise. Undeniably, when Yoshi Oida speaks this language, he brings a very appealing humour to the intonations of Drona. He is also able to separate himself from the language—his voice does one thing, his body another, which creates a very interesting tension. But for many other actors, who have had much less experience with Brook’s interculturalism, the enforced use of the English language is unfortunate. Their voices are reduced to accents, almost incomprehensible at times, which distract attention from their presence on stage. It was particularly sad to see (or rather, hear) the great Cieslak hindered by his muffled diction in an otherwise regal performance as Dhritarashtra. But what is the point of a ‘regal performance’ from an actor who has probably crossed more psycho-physical barriers than any other performer in the western theatre? This Dhritarashtra was a regression for Grotowski’s foremost disciple—it was like watching a great artist play Blind Man’s Buff in a charade. Many critics in New York complained about the unintelligibility of some of the actors. Asserting that they had been recruited from the ‘first, second, and third worlds, and some of them from out of this world’, John Simon of New York Magazine complained of ‘accents ranging from the opaque to the inscrutable and, even when scrutable, often cacophonous’ (Loney 1988, p. 21). Reacting to these ‘critical objections’ with ‘surprise and puzzlement’, Brook pointed out how differently the production had been received in Europe, where the ‘accents’ of

82 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

the actors had not posed a problem (ibid., pp. 21–2). Though there is some truth in this statement, I believe that it is Brook himself who is more seriously Eurocentric in his advocacy of a theatre, where the cultures of the world can be subsumed within his European structure and framework of values. As much as he dislikes the term, Brook’s Mahabharata is a ‘cultural salad’ of which he is the unacknowledged chef. The materials of this salad have come from all parts of the world, but it is Brook’s house dressing which gives the salad its distinct taste. Occasionally, we do get some faint tastes of other cultures that manage to retain their identity; there are also eruptions of energy that break through the mise-en-scène. But invariably, these energies are constrained by the limits set on them, or else, they are permitted to indulge in what becomes a parody of ‘otherness’ (for example, the tribal tomfoolery of Hidimba and Ghatotkacha that exudes ‘Africanness’). What cannot be denied is that Brook controls his disparate materials with total authority. He puts his stamp on all of them, whether it is a mask of a prop or an instrument. His eclecticism is perfectly disciplined, there is never an element out of place. He knows exactly what he wants, and he gets it. Once he places his mark on his materials, they no longer belong to their cultures. They become part of his world. While I would situate this directorial method within the context of appropriation, there are many other scholars and artists who would view his work in a more harmonious and universal context. Richard Schechner, for instance, in an interview with Brook himself, has claimed that, ‘Of the intentionally intercultural productions I’ve seen your Mahabharata is the finest example of something genuinely syncretic’ (Schechner 1986). During a particular moment in the production, when Australian Aborigine didjeridus (long flutes) were played, Schechner states that, The performance actualized (for him) the cultural layerings of India herself: Melanesian, Harappan, Vedic, Sanskritic, Hindu, Muslim, English, Contemporary’. If only such insights were available to us in India, we would not need to worry about the dissensions in our culture. All we would need to do is to listen to flutes—not Krishna’s, but the Australian Aborigine’s —to realize our total heritage. For me, the didjeridus was one more eclectic element in an orchestra that included a range of exotic instruments. From the programme, we learn of the use of ney, shanaj, launeddas, fujara, kamantche, analapos and of course—for some ‘authentic’ Indian sound—the nadasvaram. Predictably, Brook was happy with Toshi Tsuchitori’s score which ‘wasn’t quite Indian, nor non-Indian, a kind of music that has the “taste” of India’ (Banu 1985, p. 69). Though I would not expect to hear ragas in Brook’s production, I was irritated by the synthetic ‘Indianness’ of the score—the amateur atmospherics on the tabla and obligatory nadasvaram (from which we were told it took three months before Kim Menzer could get a sound). The music epitomizes the general confusion of the production: it doesn’t want to be Indian, and yet it tries to be Indian in its own way. In his interview with

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 83

Georges Banu, Brook himself clarified the problem: ‘To tell the story we had to avoid evoking India too strongly so as not to lead us away from human identification, but also we had to nevertheless tell it as a story rooted in Indian earth’ (Banu 1985, p. 68, my italics). This balance is definitely not found in the production. By avoiding a strong evocation of India to ensure ‘human [read western] identification’, Brook’s ‘story’ could not be ‘rooted in Indian earth’. It has to float in some kind of make-believe India, somewhere between imagination and reality, neither here nor there. The space of the New York production provides an ideal site for Brook’s ambivalences. Once again, there is an ‘empty space’ (his eternal signature)— a patch of brown earth with a pond and a small river, set against a large, dilapidated wall, almost Pompeii-like in its aura of antiquity. This ‘natural’ vista is framed within the elaborate proscenium of the Majestic Theatre, an 84-yearold vaudeville and opera house, which was abandoned many years ago and then remodelled for the Mahabharata production. Thousands of dollars were spent not just to renovate the theatre, but to retain its omnipresence of decay. Chloe Oblensky’s ambitious design extends to the entire auditorium, where artistically preserved disfigurements and patches of brick on the wall enhance the antique aura on stage. Only ‘the West’ could afford to renovate a theatre and then spend more money to make it look old again. This ‘aesthetics of waste’, as I am tempted to describe the extravagant reconstruction, is symptomatic of post-modern experiments in architecture, where traditional elements are superimposed on contemporary sites. But there is a self-consciousness that guides the best of these experiments, providing irony and wit, tensions that stimulate self-reflexivity and thought. In contrast, Brook’s space is predominantly atmospheric. It provides a mystique to the very act of going to the theatre. It makes an occasion out of our attendance. This is not the first time, of course, that Brook has displayed his affinities for ruins and faraway places. Since 1974, he has based himself at the Théâtre aux Bouffes du Nord in Paris, which is also a reconstruction of a nineteenth-century ‘theatre a I’italienne’ which was abandoned in 1952 due to a fire. Earlier still, he had staged his Orghast in front of the Royal Tombs of Darius and Artaxerxes I, facing the ancient ruins of Persepolis. (This ‘space’ was made possible only through the royal patronage of the Shahbanou and her direct affiliation to the Shiraz Festival. Wherever Brook works, one can be sure that he receives the support of the political establishment.) For the Mahabharata in France, he once again worked in a natural landscape, a magnificent quarry in Balbon near Avignon. Just getting to this ‘theatre’ was something out of the ordinary. For many spectators, it felt like a pilgrimage. Where does India fit into this scenario of remote landscapes and evocations of the past? Once again, it exists as a construct, a cluster of oriental images suggesting timelessness, mystery and eternal wisdom. Brook may oppose cultural exoticism in theory, but his own work is exotic in its own right. From a press release of the Mahabharata, the selling of the Orient is apparent: ‘It unfolds in a

84 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

swirl of colour—saris, gowns, and garments of saffron, crimson and gold, umbrellas of rippling blue silk, red banners and snow-white robes. Heroes lose kingdoms, virgin princesses elope with gods.’ Even making allowances for the rhetoric of publicity, I believe that the production does live up to its expectations. It is not a victim, but the apotheosis of hype. What do people remember of the Mahabharata, I wonder? Certainly, not the Bhagavad Gita (which is over before one is even aware of it), nor the characters (who tend to blend into one another after a while). Let us forget more profound matters like the meaning of the ‘story’ and the context to which it belongs. I believe that what keeps the production going are visual effects, sometimes blatantly magical, like the totally redundant levitation act in Virata’s court, and more pertinently, the disappearance of Kichaka into a sack after he has been dismembered. There are more sensational effects like Drona pouring a pot of blood over his head, and the serpentine ring of fire that springs out of the earth. Sometimes, the visuals are surprising in their very literalness, for example, the iron ball that emerges from Gandhari’s costume and then rolls into the pond, and Bhishma lying on a bed of arrows. Decorating the entire mise-en-scène, of course, are explicit icons of Indian culture, now popularized through our cottage industries, like carpets, durries, mats, thalis, marigolds, divas, incense. In this visual feast of the Orient, India retains its ‘glamour’ and ‘novelty’. For how long, one doesn’t know. Already, the lure of the Raj is beginning to pall; it is no longer as lucrative for producers to finance another Far Pavilions. Interculturalists, who are always on the hunt for materials from the East, are beginning to turn away from India to discover new sources to feed their theories and visions. This Mahabharata, hailed as ‘the theatrical event of the century’, will be remembered as yet another landmark in Brook’s career. But how many people will remember the Mahabharata itself? Has this glorious trivilization of our epic brought western people closer to an understanding of India? Or has it not merely enhanced the distance that exists between us? One could end this essay with these questions, but the affirmation of interculturalism in Brook’s Mahabharata compels us to open up areas of human experience that are not generally confronted in theatre criticism. Unavoidably, the production raises the question of ethics, not just the ethics of representation, which concerns the decontextualization of an epic from its history and culture, but the ethics of interacting with people (notably Indians) in the process of creating the work itself. For me, the process of Brook’s intercultural method of research cannot be separated from the production, even though their links may not be immediately apparent. It is at the level of interactions that the human dimensions of interculturalism are, at once, most potent and problematic. Tellingly, they are almost never confronted in theatre research, quite unlike the recent trends in anthropology, for instance, where the racist and Eurocentric dimensions in representing other cultures have been extended beyond the writing of ethnography to the actual

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 85

relationships—personal, social, and professional—that are initiated between anthropologists and their subjects. In this context, one needs to call attention to some of the ruptures and contradictions in the relationships generated around Brook’s production, particularly in the Indian context. There are many stories which have circulated in Indian theatrical circles (which have now travelled to the West) about how Brook promised to invite a 16-year-old Chhau dancer from an Indian village to Paris, and then forgot about him; how he and his actors invariably failed to respect the ritualistic context of traditional performances; how they were so concerned with their own priorities and schedules that they rarely found the time to interact with Indian people; and perhaps, most ignominiously, how they handled money in their deals with Indian artists (Zarrilli 1986, pp. 92–9; Hiltebeitel 1992, pp. 134–41). There are obvious difficulties in highlighting these tensions which could be considered too personal, fractious, if not downright hostile to Brook and his company of actors. At a more theoretical level, one could argue that the behaviour of artists exploring ‘other’ cultures is of marginal relevance to the work that they are able to produce through a transformation of indigenous materials. But what about relationships? Do they have to be restricted to what transpires between the actor and spectator? What about the actor and his sources of creativity? Is interculturalism nothing more than a variant on contemporary art practice? Can its aesthetics be separated from the relationships around theatre in which a meeting of cultural identities is made possible in the first place? While it is difficult enough to raise these questions within the confines of academic discourse, it is harder to confront them in the actual encounters generated through intercultural theatre practice. Invariably, the deepest critiques of ethnocentrism and neo-colonial behaviour are made by people who have been directly affected by them. More often than not, however, these critiques rarely get represented in print, which is what determines the production of academic discourse. They are suffered in silence, or shared with a few friends. The hurt is internalized, or else masked through smiles and gestures of hospitality. What emerges is an underground history of interculturalism that totally contradicts the official scenario. Such is the case with Brook’s Mahabharata. Ironically, yet tellingly, the dissenting views on the production have appeared, however piecemeal, through publishing channels in the West rather than in India itself, where Brook’s tours (both before and after the production) have received a generally adulatory response from the Indian press. It is in this context that one needs to counter Probir Guha’s critique of Brook’s ‘cultural piracy’ in an ‘interview’ entitled ‘The Aftermath’ conducted by Phillip Zarrilli for The Drama Review. ‘The Aftermath’ is more like an afterword insofar as it is one of a series of interviews with Brook conducted by a group of admirers, including Richard Schechner, the editor of The Drama Review. At no point in these interviews are Brook’s premises on interculturalism and Indian culture seriously challenged. He

86 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

is allowed to represent himself in a rather graceful and liberal exchange of ideas. Then, there is the ‘Aftermath’ in which we get to hear the ‘critical’ voice of the ‘Third World’ as it were, not just Guha’s but Zarrilli’s and Deborah Heff’s as well. What is described as an ‘interview’ is really an edited version of a discussion. Though a detailed analysis of the ‘interview’ is not possible here, I would tend to agree with Avanthi Meduri in her critical response to the ‘interview’ that, By guiding the conversation with Guha, Zarrilli in fact became Guha’s spokesman…. In trying to vindicate us thus, he made us victims, using the power of the written word. Guha should have been allowed to speak in his own voice, without interruption, without mediation. (Meduri, Zarrilli and Heff 1988, p. 16) However, within the constraints of the ‘interview’, one notes Guha’s discomfort when Brook fails to follow up on an invitation extended to the Chhau dancer, who had been represented by Guha himself. One senses Guha’s loss of credibility both in relation to the boy and the villagers. But for all his anger (‘we don’t want to be guinea pigs for experiments’) and the hurt that comes through receiving discarded ‘gifts’ like a sweater (‘It was just an extra for them… they don’t know how to give’), one is ultimately left with the sense of Guha’s deprivation, of feeling left out: ‘I really expected at least one invitation to the Mahabharata. It’s nothing. I wouldn’t go because I don’t have the money. But I would feel honoured that he remembers me’ (Zarrilli 1986, p. 99). ‘Honoured’: there is poignance in this word given the context of the relationship. At one level, it is part of our colonial residue, our hankering for some sanction from the West, even after being exploited by it. But what is it that perpetuates this hankering for the West in India today? Perhaps, it is an absence of recognition and economic support that gives Indian artists like Guha the false hope that they can improve their lot by affiliating themselves to Festival India and ventures like the Mahabharata. Why did Guha continue to crave an invitation from Brook, even after being hurt and losing his credibility at home? Avanthi Meduri answers the question boldly: ‘He needs the big fish, as much as the big fish need the small fish’ (Meduri 1988, p. 17). In our existing system of power, Meduri believes that the myth of intercultural exchange, based on premises of trust and friendship, should be associated more categorically with a ‘transaction’. One should not seek the friendship of big fish; rather; one should ‘negotiate a professional relationship’ with them. Though this is by no means an easy task—the big fish are likely to swallow the little ones, or else coopt them into their way of thinking—one can begin this ‘negotiation’ by asserting one’s territory. And by territory, I do not merely mean land or techniques or knowledge, but what is part of us. There is no need to endorse appropriations of our culture: they are neither uplifting for our morale

POINTS OF DEPARTURE 87

nor particularly lucrative in the long run. Appropriations may not disappear overnight, but we can be more vigilant about them. This vigilance, however, can materialize only if we begin to confront the necessity of upholding our self-respect. Cultural appropriations, after all, are made possible not only through coercion but complicity. In this context, one should emphasize that the most vehement critics of Brook’s ‘cultural piracy’ were only too visible in his seminars and workshops when he returned to India with the film version of the Mahabharata. Some of his early dissenters were even on the organizing committee. Apart from a few murmurs of discomfort relating primarily to the portraiture of a ‘black’ Bhima, which was not without its own racist ambivalences, the discussions at large were euphoric and eminently diplomatic. But even as all Durbars come to an end, the Brook phenomenon faded almost as soon as it had emerged, provoking even the most mindless of his admirers to question what we in India had received from the Mahabharata. What had been ‘exchanged’? And why did our government have to sponsor a production that we never got to see with more liberal funding than any other theatrical venture supported so far in India? It seems to me that apart from questioning cultural appropriations like Brook’s production, we also need to address the larger system of power that makes such appropriations possible in the first place. For a deeper analysis of these questions, we now enter a different phase in my ‘theatrical journey’ as I attempt to explore an alternative mode of intercultural research conducted in India itself—smaller in scale than the Mahabharata, yet more grounded in the context of peoples’ lives. In this phase of my journey, which I would like to view as a ‘transition’, I hope to counter some of the intercultural models discussed so far in this book, opening up those ‘human dimensions’ that have been tacitly, yet persistently ignored in the quest for new idioms in theatre. REFERENCES All quotations from the production are taken from The Mahabharata by Jean-Claude Carrière, translated by Peter Brook, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987. Banu, Georges (1985), interview with Peter Brook, Alternatives Théâtrales, July 24, 1985. Reprinted in The Drama Review, Spring 1986. Translated by Anna Husemoller. Bose, Buddhadeva (1986), The Book of Yudhishthir, translated by Sujit Mukherjee, Hyderabad: Sangam Books. Chaitanya, Krishna (1985), The Mahabharata: A Literary Study, New Delhi: Clarion Books. Hiltebeitel, Alf (1992), ‘Transmitting Mahabharatas: Another Look at Peter Brook’, The Drama Review, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall 1992. Kakar, Sudhir (1982), The Inner World, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Karve, Iravati (1974), Yuganta, New Delhi: Sangam Books.

88 PETER BROOK’S MAHABHARATA: A VIEW FROM INDIA

Loney, Glenn (1988), ‘Myth and Music: Resonances across the Continents and Centuries’, Theater, Spring 1988, pp. 21–7. Meduri, Avanthi, Zarrilli, Phillip and Heff, Deborah (1988), ‘More Aftermath after Peter Brook’, The Drama Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 1988, pp. 14–19. Schechner, Richard (ed.) (1986), ‘Talking with Peter Brook’, The Drama Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 1986. Zarrilli, Phillip (1986), ‘The Aftermath: When Peter Brook came to India’, The DramaReview, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring 1986.

Part II Transition

90

Chapter 5 The Request Concert project Foreword

It was pure coincidence, a meeting of two expatriates in New York City, one from West Germany, the other from India, who were strangely drawn to a play called Request Concert by Franz Xaver Kroetz. Totally wordless, the play exposes the life of a working woman one particular evening. Through her most banal gestures and actions involving cooking, eating and listening to the radio, Kroetz illuminates the acute loneliness of her inner world. More than that, he makes us confront the relationship of the woman’s gestures and actions, her silence, to social, political and environmental factors that determine her life. It is rare to find a play so concentrated, yet so large in its encapsulation of an entire world. My German colleague, Manuel Lutgenhorst, had designed the American première of Request Concert in New York, a production so riveting that I was compelled to write about it after seeing it three times. Later, I met Manuel before his departure for Asia. I sensed a restlessness in him to leave the marketplace of New York in order to find new possibilities of living and working in the theatre. As an expatriate myself, I too felt this restlessness and need to confront my history in India. Though our cultural backgrounds were different, both Manuel and I were bound through a common need to travel and to change our lives in the theatre. When Manuel returned from Asia, I had just come back from India. Something was connecting us of which we had no knowledge. One evening, we met at a friend’s house in New York. I asked Manuel what he was working on at the moment. He said: ‘I want to do Request Concert in Tokyo.’ I looked at him, then admitted: ‘I want to do Request Concert in Calcutta.’ And so, after a year of discussion, travel, correspondence and meetings with unknown people, we have embarked on a journey. Despite our cultural differences, there is a common ground on which we have chosen to work. Let us call this ground ‘Theatre’, though what we hope to be engaged in for at least the next three years of our lives goes beyond what is commonly understood by theatre. What do we want to do? It sounds so far-fetched that we are often regarded with disbelief when we talk about our project. We want to adapt and stage Request

92 TRANSITION

Concert in approximately nine Asian cities over a period of three years. Neither of us has any desire to tour a single production of Request Concert that would be rehearsed in New York and then performed throughout Asia. There would be no point in such a reductive enterprise: it would merely amount to a form of cultural tourism. Rather, we want to create individual productions of Kroetz’s play that would be rooted in the indigenous cultural context of Asian cities. In other words, for each city there will be a different actress, a different process of exploration. Because we do not presume to know the history and culture of these cities better than the people who live in them, we believe that it is necessary to create a working situation in which individuals from the city—they could be historians, feminists, workers, housewives—could confront the ‘text’ of Request Concert with their own tensions, problems and contradictions. In our own ways, my friend and I would like to learn from the cultural differences that will emerge through the staging of our productions. We know that a woman in Tokyo would have totally different reasons for her behaviour and action from a woman in Kerala. We can see how differently they will cook, sit and listen to the radio; their rhythms will be different; their responsibilities will vary. Their smallest gesture could reveal a world of a difference. But perhaps, in all these differing situations, there could also be links and correspondences, moments of inarticulate feeling that could be shared by women from different countries in Asia. Our ultimate goal is to create a theatrical forum in which all the productions of Request Concert could be juxtaposed or performed simultaneously through a collage of videotapes and live performances. In this forum we believe that the differences embodied in the productions will illuminate the specificities of particular cultures. Only by confronting these specificities can we hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the relationships between cultures. Differences do not necessarily alienate people; if they are truly respected and acknowledged, then they can help us to understand what we have in common. There’s much more that needs to be said about the theoretical premises underlying our theatrical journey. But we are just embarking on it, and perhaps, it would be best for our work to speak for itself. We will learn more about the journey as we experience it. However, it should be stressed that this project is very different from other intercultural ventures in the contemporary theatre, where the primary impetus has been to take something from a foreign culture and then graft it on to one’s own cultural tradition. In contrast, Manuel and I want to create something in foreign cultures for the people who live in these cultures, We realize that the structure of Kroetz’s play may be intrinsically western, but we do not want to impose it on our audiences. To the best of our ability, we want to adapt it to local conditions of life. What we would like most of all is to experience an authentic exchange whereby we can offer our particular skills in the theatre for insights into the workings of a specific culture. We hope that we will be able to give as much as

THE REQUEST CONCERT PROJECT 93

we receive. The collaboration will materialize only if we see ourselves more as coordinators than directors of the individual productions. It goes without saying that we would not have embarked on this journey if we had not received considerable support from theatre workers and communities for whom we wish to perform in Asia. What we still need is financial support from some generous organization. The Max Mueller Bhavan has contributed a certain amount of money for the three productions in India, but all transportation and documentation expenses so far have been borne by us. We are not sure how we will finance the second lap of our journey. But we believe that if there is a real need for the project, then it will be supported. I should also add that we have been somewhat reassured by Meyerhold’s famous advice to Gladkov: ‘You must make people pay you well to do the theatre they want, but you must pay out of your own pocket to do the theatre you want.’ As the following essays in the second part of the book will reveal, the premises of our intercultural project were to a large extent fulfilled, even though we were able to stage five rather than nine productions. As yet, we have not been able to hold a ‘forum’ in which all the productions have been staged, even though videotapes of the individual productions have travelled widely throughout Asia. At least one of the productions (from Madras) has been staged in an important dance-theatre festival in West Germany. But to my mind, the process of learning from the individual productions has far exceeded our expectations, and consequently, the need to synthesize these unique experiments into one event (which was our original goal) has now become less immediate. In the following essays, I reflect on the process of learning embedded in the exploration of Kroetz’s text within the cultural contexts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. These essays are followed by a ‘Retrospect’ in which the achievements of the project are juxtaposed against the constraints of intercultural theory and practice as outlined in the first part of this book. In the ‘Retrospect’, I also indicate the limits of the project in relation to the specific demands and necessities posed by the socio-political condition in India today. At a personal level, the Request Concert Project could be described as a ‘transition’ in which I consciously moved away from my life as an expatriate in the United States to confront my own history and culture in India, where I am now permanently based. The lessons I have learned from the project relate not only to theatre, but to the actual process of living in different ‘regions’ of India. As I relive the productions, I realize how the life of the theatre extends beyond its duration on stage. The act of writing has brought me closer to the inner contradictions and the energies of the project itself. I would like to begin my dramaturgical description of the project with the production in Calcutta, where the play was first staged in 1986 at a puppet theatre in Kasba. This will be followed by essays on the Bombay and Madras productions, leading to a brief reflection on the process of transporting the Madras production to West Germany. The section ends with a ‘Retrospect’ in

94 TRANSITION

which I situate the individual productions in the larger framework of interculturalism and its validity in the Indian socio-cultural context today.

Chapter 6 Request Concert in Calcutta

The first stop on our theatrical journey was my home city of Calcutta. A turbulent metropolis of approximately 10.2 million people, notoriously chaotic and contradictory, where nothing seems to work and yet everything continues, Calcutta remains one of the most human cities in India today. Having grown up in this city and on returning to it on many occasions, I continue to wonder at its resilience. Despite its history of problems and calamities—including the manmade famine of Bengal in 1943, which destroyed millions of people, communal riots and killings, a persistent influx of refugees both before the Bangladesh genocide and after, and a steady withdrawal of businesses and industries to more lucrative cities like Bombay and Delhi—Calcutta continues to live, defying Rajiv Gandhi’s controversial (and politically self-injurious) statement that it is a ‘dying city’. For us, Calcutta was anything but dying. It presented a constant challenge to our work, never ceasing to make us question the validity of our assumptions on interculturalism in the theatre. For some time during our rehearsal process, we despaired about the ‘truth’ of our production, which seemed too tame, overly artistic in relation to the extremities of life on the streets. However, after much self-questioning and many valuable discussions with some concerned Calcuttans, notably active members in women’ organizations, we staged Request Concert (or Anurodher Asar as it was called in Bengal) in what we believed was an honest production. The following is a series of notes on various aspects of the production ranging from formal and textual considerations (silence, gesture, space and time) to an examination of the underlying social context. While these notes reflect my own views on the production, I should emphasize that the work itself was truly collaborative, involving myself, my co-director, Manuel Lutgenhorst, and Usha Ganguli, our actress, without whom Request Concert could not have been realized as Anurodher Asar. THE PERFORMANCE SPACE The first challenge of the production was to find a place where it could live. The existing theatre spaces in the city seemed too artificial in their proscenium

96 TRANSITION

structures, apart from being burdened with bureaucratic problems. We wanted to perform the play in the rehearsal space itself, the process of exploring the play being as important to us as the performances for an audience. Eventually, it was Usha who guided us to a most intimate room, the rehearsal space of the Calcutta Puppet Theatre. Situated in the heart of Kasba, one of the most volatile areas in Calcutta, near the Ballygunge Station, the room is situated directly under a bridge. Its proximity to trains, trams, buses, dhabas, tea-stalls, a multitude of shops and an even larger multitude of people endows it with all the rhythms and tensions one associates with Calcutta. We took one look at the room and realized its possibilities. Apart from the environmental sounds which would serve as the live sound track for our production, the room itself resonated two worlds: a lower-middle-class Bengali world, and that inexplicably magical world of the theatre. Strewn around the room were props, crates, spotlights, tubes and a most bewildering array of puppets, ranging from a large papier-mâché camel to a Bengali folk-puppet of an elephant perched on a rod. In the very space of the production, we found one of the central questions of our project. To what extent is Kroetz’s play ‘real’? And how is reality itself, the life outside the Calcutta Puppet Theatre, more theatrical than theatre? On the one hand, we wanted to create ‘life’ within real walls and doors, but at the same time we wanted to highlight the reality of the theatrical event. Theatre, we rediscovered, has its own reality, its own sense of space and time. Hence, along with the living, historical reality of Kasba that was always a presence in our production, we felt the need (at a later stage in the rehearsal process) to create a very nondescript proscenium made out of bamboo and black cloth. Within this structure, which defined the theatrical space more sharply, the walls and doors were more real; their presence was heightened. At the same time, we decided not to conceal the theatrical aura of the Calcutta Puppet Theatre. Rather, we simply pushed the props and puppets to the sides of the walls so that our spectators could sit comfortably on durries in the centre of the room. THE USE OF SOUND While maintaining the theatrical aura of the Calcutta Puppet Theatre, we realized that the sound filtering into the room needed to be highlighted by taped sound of Kasba itself. At first, I argued with Manuel that the strength of the play lies in its silence. I was wary of simulated sounds, a technology that had to be concealed. But at the same time I knew only too well that it is almost impossible to shut oneself off from the sheer cacophony of life in Calcutta. Where is silence to be found in this omnipresence of noise? The rattle and clanging of trams, the phut-phutting of dilapidated buses, the cries of street vendors, the slogans of processions…these are sounds very different from the sepulchral silence suggested in Kroetz’s text. But Manuel

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 97

pointed out to me that people in Calcutta don’t seem to hear these sounds anymore: they have entered the mainstream of life. Hence, it was necessary for us in the theatre to make our audience rediscover these sounds that form a perpetual backdrop of noise to our inner silence. The more we worked on the production, the more we realized that even silence can be loud. Even though the woman in Request Concert does not speak, she moves and acts. Her life is full of sounds—minute, infinitesimal sounds that she probably does not hear—involving washing, eating, lighting a match, placing a glass on the table, switching on a light, burping, humming, singing. Our character (Joya Sen) did not utter a single word, but she sang when she ate her solitary meal, her voice seeming to fight the banality of the lyrics on the radio but only serving to highlight it. In Calcutta, we found that the radio programme closest to the popular Request Concert broadcast in Kroetz’s text was Anurdoher Asar. Now perhaps less popular than other programmes featuring film music and Rabindrasangeet (to whose dulcet sounds most Bengalis wake up in the morning), Anurodher Asar remains a programme with a rich and long history, a seemingly timeless repository of lyrics and melodies, speaking of love, separation and loneliness. Within hours of our using these Bengali songs, I found that Manuel was familiar with snatches of their tunes, which he compared to German popular music and ballads of the fifties—the oldies, as they are known in America. Dah-de-dumda. La-la-la-la. Bhalobashi-i–i-i–i. The banality of love lyrics, we discovered, cuts across historical barriers. Apart from the radio, the television was another source of sounds—more specifically, of words in our production. At 7.30 p.m. precisely during each performance, Joya Sen would turn on the news, the live broadcast from the Calcutta television station, where our audience was made to confront the topicalities of life: strikes, the raising of bus fares, transportation breakdowns, accidents, terrorist attacks, India’s march towards the twenty-first century, Rajiv Gandhi. For a long time, we debated whether or not we should delete the television sequence from our production, which plays a fairly important role in the original text. We wondered whether the television would not be too much of a luxury for a middle-class working woman. However, when we explored the proliferation of the television industry all over India, including the suburban and rural areas, we realized that a television is no longer a status symbol; it has become a fixture in almost every middle-class household. Even working-class families are beginning to purchase their own. We decided that our character, Joya Sen, bought a small black-and-white television on an instalment plan not because she wanted it, but because of a certain social pressure to buy the commodity. What we tried to show in our television sequence was not her alienation from it (television is too much of a novelty as yet in India to be alienating), but its encumbrance on her life.

98 TRANSITION

While Miss Sen watched the news, she thus calculated the bill for her month’s instalment of the set. Unlike Anurodher Asar, to which she was almost mythically linked, the television remained an object without a personality. In our production, we placed it with its back to the audience, so that the spectators would not be distracted by the visuals. On the contrary, they were made to confront the quality of its sounds—muffled, anonymous, mechanical; very different from the sentimental tunes of Anurodher Asar. A TURBULENT SILENCE Despite the sounds of the radio, television and the environmental noise of Kasba, the strength of our production lay in its silence. There was nothing Chekhovian about it: we made no attempt to nuance it, or to highlight it atmospherically through a counterpoint of ‘poetic’ sounds. The silence in our production was felt in the presence of our actress, as she sat at the table and chewed paan meditatively, as she embroidered a tablecloth for almost fifteen minutes, as she looked out of the window peering voyeuristically at unseen neighbours. The silence of her being, only occasionally interrupted by a hum or sigh, offered a strong contrast to the noise surrounding her life. At a purely external level, there is no silence to be found in Calcutta, either in the streets or at home. And yet, having lived in this city for more than twentyfour years, I have sometimes felt and shared a silence that people carry within themselves. While waiting interminably for a bus to arrive or standing in a queue for kerosene or a postage stamp, life goes on around you at a hectic pace while you wait for your turn, silently. The silence in Calcutta is a weight that one carries within oneself. For an actress in India to reveal this silence takes a great deal of courage. Layers of social imposition have to be resisted. False securities have to be shed. We found that Usha was more than prepared to deal with the external actions and gestures of the role, but she needed time and a great deal of support to confront the silence within her character. The real breakthrough during rehearsal came when she first performed the action of sleeping. Those first moments when you are trying to sleep, staring at the ceiling, are when you can be truly alone with your silence. Not even the sounds which continue to filter in from the street can disturb it. For us, those first moments before sleep gave us a true insight into Joya Sen’s inner world, her turbulent silence. ROUTINE: COOKING When Joya Sen was awake, she had social and household responsibilities to perform. It was this never-ending routine to which most women in our audience responded.

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 99

Joya Sen’s routine was exaggerated by the fact that she was almost obsessively clean—a characteristic embedded in Kroetz’s text, providing the character with a certain definition and concreteness: she is not just a ‘typical working woman’, but a particular woman with specific traits. We found that the unmarried status of Joya Sen did not alienate her from the audience precisely because she had to perform familiar tasks known to women (and tacitly ignored by men). One of the most revealing comments after the production came from a man. ‘Now I know,’ he said, ‘what my wife does for me every day’. Cooking, washing, filling up buckets of water, cleaning, stitching…he routine continues. It is made all the more arduous because certain facilities continue to be unavailable to most women. In Joya Sen’s world, there is no electric stove, no refrigerator, no such household comforts as in the American production of Request Concert. These are luxury items, apart from being redundant in a city with frequent power cuts. The kerosene stove can be an adequate substitute for an electric one, but it is more time-consuming. Besides, one has to rely on kerosene which may not be available. Apart from the unavailability of facilities, there is also a great deal more work involved in the fulfilment of certain basic actions. Joya Sen cannot simply use a tea bag to make herself a cup of tea. As for food, she cannot open a can of Campbell’s soup like her American counterpart. She has to cook a meal from scratch. At first, we thought of economizing on time by having her eat two chappatis with some sabji. But we soon realized that a Bengali meal is simply incomplete without rice. Manuel and I decided she should eat a sizeable quantity of rice for each performance, supplemented with dal, a boiled potato, chillies, some tetuler achar and a moderately sized paan. The audience seemed to love watching her eat: they empathized with the flavour of the food and the texture of eating. In no sequence was the Bengaliness of our production more immediate and participatory. Apart from the obvious enjoyment with which Joya Sen initially ate her meal (which did wear off later), Manuel and I wanted to emphasize certain social pressures that are unconsciously subsumed within the act of eating itself. First of all, there are codes to be followed, involving eating gestures, the blending of flavours, the selection of food according to the time of day, and many other rules that make eating a serious business in Bengal. In early rehearsals, for instance, Usha would sprinkle water around her thali before beginning to eat. On seeing this gesture, some Bengali women working at the Calcutta Puppet Theatre informed us that an unmarried woman could not perform the gesture. Another woman informed us that this set of gestures, which is galled gondush, is performed only by Brahmins and widows. Frequently, we discovered various interpretations of the rules, but the rules were there, seemingly inflexible and known to all in the audience.

100 TRANSITION

We discovered that there is very little scope for improvising a meal in Bengal. Food cannot be assembled as it so frequently is in the West—for example, a slice of cheese and ham, say, wedged between two slices of bread —it has to be cooked from scratch. Onions have to be fried, masalas mixed. Even with the increasingly popular use of refrigerators (an important investment these days for middle-class families), food is rarely preserved for more than a day. Needless to say, the constant shopping and cooking place great demands on women, particularly when their men continue to demand their bhat and jhol In our production, Joya Sen had no family to cook for (an oddly poignant fact in the Indian context), but she had a responsibility to eat well. She had to season her food and maintain all the rules that are assumed by her society. For instance, she could never use her left hand to touch any food while eating it. We found that there was a great deal of energy involved in the consumption of food. Unlike her American counterpart who could simply sip her Campbell’s soup with a spoon, using metronomic gestures, Joya Sen had to mix her food with her fingers. She kneaded the rice into solid balls. She squeezed the potato into a paste. She licked the dal from her fingers. She smeared the achar on her tongue. Just watching Usha eat her meal from performance to performance convinced me that eating in Bengal is a performance in its own right, in which the roots, the very flavour of a culture can be tasted. Spectators who saw the eating sequence during rehearsal were vehement in their suggestions and occasional protests. At an early point in the rehearsal, we thought that it would be theatrically effective if Joya Sen could eat an orange after her meal. The separation of the orange into segments, the picking of fibres around the segments, could provide vivid details of gesture. But there was a violent resistance to our choice. ‘She would never eat an orange after dinner’, declared one outraged spectator. ‘Why?’ I dared ask. ‘We just don’t eat oranges after dinner. It’s not good for you.’ Manuel and I realized that these choices had to be taken seriously because they were deeply embedded in people’s responses to their own culture. For instance, in a later sequence where the woman embroiders for almost fifteen minutes, we wanted her to interrupt her work by making her drink a cup of tea. Once again, there was a categorical denial that a Bengali woman would have tea after dinner. Milk, perhaps, a sweet or two, but not tea. ‘That’s a western custom’ was the most common response. We realized that if we defiantly continued to make Joya Sen drink tea while embroidering, the audience would simply tune off because they would be focusing on the tea rather than on the action contained within the embroidery. The lesson to be learned from our experiments with food in Anurodher Asar is that you must respect the taboos of a particular culture. You can experiment only within the confines of its own rules.

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 101

ROUTINE: CLEANLINESS One of the greatest controversies we faced was the representation of cleanliness in our production. We had inadvertently broken many rules. Some spectators (primarily upper-middle-class) just could not accept our extensive use of the mori in the kitchen area where the woman washed herself and her dishes. In the process, it was claimed that she was making the dishes jhuta (unclean). Lowermiddle-class spectators were more sanguine about her using the mori to spit and wash the dishes in, so long as she kept the dishes apart. Eventually, Joya Sen washed her hands and feet in the bathroom, but she also gargled in the mori after eating her meal. Most spectators were willing to admit that they did this at home. Another observation that struck us during the rehearsal process was the relationship between cleanliness and concealment: there again, we confronted double standards. From our first rehearsal, Usha made it clear to us that she would not change her sari in full view of the audience. She was not being coy: it was simply not done to show her washing herself with her blouse and petticoat on. Manuel and I were compelled to question a sensitive area in a Bengali woman’s culture. We found that the only time Joya Sen was likely to take off her clothes was when she bathed in the morning. Even then, it was possible that she would bathe in the more common manner of pouring water on to herself with her sari on. The wet sari would then be taken off while she wrapped the dry sari around her. I dwell on this sequence because it highlighted for us how compulsively the body is concealed by women in Bengal. Ironically, the concealment only serves to highlight the body. For instance, every time the sari slipped slightly from her shoulders, Joya Sen would unconsciously hitch it above her blouse, which only served to accentuate the body. The more we worked on the play, the more we discovered that these unconscious gestures of concealing the body could be used to suggest the state of sexual abstinence that Kroetz emphasizes in his play. We also found that the relationship between Fraulein Rasch’s obsessive cleanliness and her sexual abstinence could be convincingly transferred to our characterization of Joya Sen. Her very propriety and fastidiousness revealed her intimate longings for a relationship. LONELINESS AND TOUCHING There was no possibility of a relationship for Joya Sen in our production. Unmarried, getting on in years, and so ordinary that you could pass her by without noticing her, she was resigned to her abstinence. At the office where she worked as a clerk the men were not interested in her. She had neither money, nor looks, and her monthly salary of 750 rupees and her meagre savings could scarcely contribute towards a dowry.

102 TRANSITION

Besides, her own affinities towards the bhadralok class, threatened though it is by her decreasing economic status, would not permit her to marry a man from a lower class. Neither was there a possibility of a romance or a careless ‘fling’ for our Joya Sen. She was too respectable for that. Hence, there seemed no alternative for her but to remain that thoroughly unacceptable, socially humiliated person in Bengali society: the unmarried woman. In the context of her solitude and abstinence, we found it necessary for Joya Sen to touch herself. We found that it was only by caressing and nurturing herself that Joya Sen could ‘keep going’. The touching was represented very discreetly in our production. At no point was there a suggestion of masturbation, as there might very well have been in a European production. But there was a strong element of fantasy as Joya Sen lay down in bed after completing her chores and stroked her hair, listening to Anurodher Asar. More precisely, there was a moment when she wiped her hands on the towel and gradually allowed her brisk gestures to merge into a caressing of her fingers. A casual glance at a calendar on the wall—baby Krishna holding on to a milk pot —completed the moment for us. In it Usha was able to reveal her character’s longing for a child. It took some time for Usha fully to accept that her character needed to nurture herself. The breakthrough came one day during rehearsal when she was sitting at the dressing-table applying Basanta Malati cream to her face and hands. Her surrender to the action was so complete, the movement so fluid, that I wondered whether she was not lingering over the sequence too much. I quietly went up to her and asked: ‘Who are you doing this for?’ Still in character, partly Joya Sen, partly Usha Ganguli, she said. ‘I am doing it for myself.’ THE EMBROIDERY RITUAL The most revealing sequence in our production—one which illuminated various aspects of Joya Sen’s womanhood, her innermost being as a woman—involved embroidery. It was a meticulously crafted sequence, rigorously faithful to the inner movement of the original text in which the woman stitches a wall-hanging for a considerable length of time. What matters is not whether it is a tablecloth (as it was in our production) or a wall-hanging, but what happens within a space of time to Joya Sen herself. As emphasized by Kroetz in the text, the woman has been working on the wall-hanging for at least a month-and-a-half. It has occupied her evenings, providing an additional ritual to her life. Every day she has prepared for her task by bringing out the scissors and tablecloth and lamp in a precise order. On the evening on which the play focuses, she completes her task (it could more accurately be described as a hobby of sorts, a pastime activity). But even this hobby does not free the woman in any way. Rather, it imprisons her within its own meticulous routine.

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 103

In an almost totally static sequence—which lasted for almost sixteen minutes on most performances—it was obvious to us that the acting during the embroidery had to be delicately textured. The texture had to come from touch, from gesture, from an inner dance. It was accentuated by the physical texture of the tablecloth itself. The more I watched Usha use this prop, the more it became like a child to me. She seemed to fondle it on occasion, smoothing out its creases. When she lay it on the table, she used a patting gesture to soothe it, as it were. And when she finished the tablecloth, she would bite the thread almost like a kiss. If these details seem too sentimental, I should emphasize that they were performed almost invisibly and with the greatest restraint. A prop that greatly helped to define the texture of the scene was the embroidery hoop: a circle of cloth in which you could see the needle and thread creating the embroidery. This circle was a sign as it were for Usha’s ‘circle of concentration’, which was so intense that we did not feel the need to distract from it. In the New York production, a radio play had been used as background while the woman stitched, providing some comic relief to the static action. We decided to avoid such a choice, nor did we create a falsely romantic atmosphere through the broadcast of ghazals or ragas. On the contrary, we continued to play Anurodher Asar, the banality of its lyrics serving to counterpoint the still concentration of the woman. In the embroidery, I was able to differentiate between details, gestures, actions and moments. The details came from the embroidery itself, the leaves and petals on the cloth, the threading of the needle. The gestures were defined through Usha’s handling of the embroidery. As Joya Sen’s attitudes to the tablecloth changed, so did the gestures. When she was content, her hand moved steadily in a diagonal as she stitched away. But then, she would become restless, and the stitching gestures would become lax. At one point, she almost seemed to crumple the tablecloth in her fists: a sign of mute protest. But then, she would return to her work once more and her gestures would be determined. She would sit up straight, tidy her hair, settle her sari and stitch with resolution. The movement in the scene (as opposed to the gestures and details) occurred when she would interrupt her work and break out of the static framework. All these deviations from the task of embroidery (eating a paan, checking the time, looking at herself briefly in the mirror) served as blank spaces, actions-inlimbo that brought a new intensity to her embroidery when she returned to it. What we discovered was essential for the tonality of the entire sequence was a total acceptance of time. None of the actions could be rushed. We found that the faster Usha tried to play the embroidery scene, the longer it felt. But when she forgot time, then she was able to absorb us in her actions and the inner workings of her mind. For most people in the audience, the embroidery sequence held the attention. A few were bored, particularly during the first moments. But the more they opened themselves to the sense of time in the sequence, the more they were able to get from it.

104 TRANSITION

INSERTIONS AND OMISSIONS All texts are, at one level, pretexts for one’s own explorations. However, early in the rehearsal period, Manuel and I knew that our improvisations had to be rooted in a close examination of Kroetz’s text, which is deceptively naturalistic in its matter-of-fact sequence of everyday gestures and actions. As we probed the text, literally beat by beat, we found ruptures in the sequences, odd interruptions, startling bumps in the linear flow of action. Take the entrance, for instance. At first glance, it would seem that nothing could be simpler than for a woman to enter with a shopping bag, then check her mail, place the bag on the table, and open the window. The sequence is so commonplace that one might be tempted to alter it by making the woman first place the bag on the table, then open the window, and then check her mail. ABCDE could be played AEDCB. But what we discovered was that Kroetz’s text was already AEDCB, resisting our predilection to play it ABCDE. We found that there was a disjunctive logic underlying Kroetz’s sequences that we had to be true to, so far as the ‘cultural logic’ of Bengal permitted. To put it more simply, I mean that there are certain rhythms and actions that a Bengali woman is compelled to perform in accordance with her culture, and that these rhythms and actions can occasionally contradict the sequence of actions in Kroetz’s text. The challenge, Manuel and I discovered, was not simply to allow Usha to do what she felt ‘as a Bengali woman’, but to confront Kroetz’s text in such a way that it could be stretched by the tensions and energies of life in Bengal. Sometimes, there had to be insertions in Kroetz’s text. For instance, it was absolutely essential for Joya Sen to take off her shoes almost immediately after entering her room. But when would it be appropriate for her to do so within the rhythmic sequence of Kroetz’s text? The puja sequence was also inserted by us in our production. Obviously, it is not to be found in the German text: Fraulein Rasch would probably not have heard of the goddess Lakshmi. Besides, she could very well have been a nonpractising Christian. In contrast, Joya Sen had to perform this household task of the puja because it would be expected of her by society, particularly by her dead mother to whom she also pays homage. Once again, Manuel and I knew that the puja could not be inserted anywhere. Its positioning within the performance text had to be rhythmically motivated. Eventually, Joya Sen performed her puja after washing her tea cup and heating the water on the stove for rice. In that interval, while waiting for the water to boil, she drifted into her worship of gods and parents, performing her duty with a matter-of-fact serenity. From these sequences in our production, we learned that the play is most engaging and thought-provoking when it does not duplicate ‘real-life’ movements and sequences of actions. Reality is meticulously alluded to in Request Concert on many levels, but it is interpreted and shaped in its own way.

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 105

Rather like a Pina Bausch dance piece, where the movements of a crowd during rush hour are precisely recreated on stage, Kroetz’s silent text requires the actor to perform a dance—a dance of life, of ordinariness, of banality, whose presiding spirits include the forces of consumerism, advertising and the media. We found that if Usha missed out a single beat in this dance, the sense of her actions was lost. The more meticulously she ‘danced’ the text, the more real it was. Another discovery we made is that the reality of the play is sharpened when the stage itself is not cluttered. From the start, we wanted to avoid the claustrophobia of naturalism. We found it more effective to use only the most essential objects and to leave the accessories for the audience to fill in with their own minds. Naturalism embodies a filling in of the blanks so that there is nothing left for the audience to think about. We wanted to resist this numbing process. A most interesting experiment occurred during the rehearsal process when Manuel suggested that we remove certain realistic elements within a gestural framework. For instance, during the eating sequence, Usha used a thali, but she mimed the food. Oddly enough the absence of real food made her eating gestures more concrete. Now at one level, it was inconsistent to mime the food and use a thali—either everything should be visible or invisible. But on many occasions we discovered that we saw things more clearly when they were displaced, when they were not there. These unseen elements became more perceptible when they were shown in proximity to something visible. If everything was visible, we discovered, the effect was, more often than not, naturalistic. If everything was invisible, then the sequence of actions became too abstract. But when there was a juxtaposition of the visible and the invisible, then there was a possibility of thinking in the theatre. Ultimately, we did use real food for the eating sequence, but having gone through the process of discovering different levels of representing gestures, Usha was able to play the invisible moments in her performance with an intensity that differentiated them from the visible ones. For instance, after having mimed the squeezing of lemon on the food and the picking up of a stray grain of rice, she was able to call attention to these details when she actually performed them with real food. Consequently, though all her actions were externalized in the production, she made us see some actions more clearly than others. THE LIFE OF THE CHARACTER So far I have avoided mentioning the subject of suicide. In Kroetz’s play, Fraulein Rasch ends the banality of her existence by swallowing sleeping pills. It is her one moment in the play that she can truly call her own. The decision to take her own life is sudden, yet self-determined. Unlike her actions of cooking, eating, listening to the radio and stitching, which are all conditioned by social and environmental pressures, the suicide is a personal choice.

106 TRANSITION

The more we confronted the reality of suicide in our adaptation of Request Concert, the more we were disturbed by its implications. I cannot deny that we feared accusations of falsifying the socio-economic realities of suicide in India today. Worse still, we feared that the suicide would be viewed as a solution to end loneliness. To a certain extent, the problems were accentuated by the fact that we were men producing a play written by a man about a woman. Our responsibilities, I believe, increased the more we confronted such contradictions. Instead of assuming the suicide as the logical end to Kroetz’s play, we questioned its ethical validity and appropriateness to the Indian context. Suicide is not uncommon in India today. Scarcely a day passes when one does not read in the newspapers about women being ‘accidentally’ burned or of women found hanging in their rooms. More often than not, the Indian women who commit suicide are driven into taking their lives. Sometimes they succumb to injuries when the ‘accidents’ to which they succumb are, in actuality, disguised murders. Their assailants are frequently their own in-laws, abetted by their husbands, who kill the woman either as a retaliation for not receiving the desired dowry, or as a means of receiving a new dowry from a new bride. ‘Dowry deaths’ are now widely publicized and numerous women’s groups all over India have reacted to them strongly. But other family pressures continue to bear on women, inflicted by men and older women. So do social humiliations that reduce women to mere commodities—servants who slave from morning to night, bearing full responsibilities for cooking, cleaning, washing, stitching, filling buckets of water, and doing all these necessary tasks of life with no payment, no acknowledgement whatsoever. In this context of the Indian woman’s oppression, it became hard to justify the affirmation of suicide in our play. As much as we emphasized that the play is not about suicide—it can be more accurately viewed as a theatrical gesture that comments on a woman’s life—people could not remove it from their minds. While we stripped it of its melodramatic possibilities, reacting consciously to the exploitative use of suicide in commercial Hindi films, we found that our audience could not avoid viewing the suicide as a climax of sorts. Almost everyone was compelled to ask: why did she do it? Before presenting my own personal response, I would like to describe how the suicide was represented in our play. Any social problem examined in a play has to be viewed within the theatrical context of its representation. It was almost an afterthought, a momentary decision, that made Joya Sen take her life. Dutifully, she went to bed, after winding the alarm clock and choosing her sari for the next day’s work. But she could not sleep. After tossing and turning in bed, she got up and took a sleeping pill. While closing the cap on the bottle, she noticed the contents of the pills as printed on the bottle. Almost absently, she emptied the pills on the table, counting them precisely as she placed them in two rows. Then, resolutely, she swallowed the pills one by one. On her seventh pill, she found that she had finished the water in her glass. Going over to the surai, she poured some more. Then she remembered

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 107

something that she had not had in a long time: orange squash. A little remained in a bottle that she had bought for a special occasion. She poured the squash into the glass, suggesting a touch of celebration, and swallowed the two remaining pills. Then, to remove the taste of pills in her mouth, she poured some more squash into the glass, mixing the water with a slow rotation of her hand. The squash splashed onto the table. She wiped the stain on the oilcloth with the end of her sari —her first entirely spontaneous, untidy gesture in the play. Then she drank what remained in the glass, and stared directly into the audience. For the first time in the production, Usha looked out, her hard stare cutting through the illusion of the ‘fourth wall’. This might seem like a trivial point, but the final look, the eyes confronting the audience, carried a resonance precisely because almost all the action in the play prior to this point was presented in profile. We found that we could not fully ‘fix’ the final expression on Joya Sen’s face, because it was not Joya Sen who was looking out at the audience but Usha Ganguli. The final moment in our production existed outside the text as envisioned by Kroetz, for whom ‘there is a look of interest in the woman’s face’ before the lights fade. On Usha’s face, there was no interest but a peculiar combination of emotions suggesting resolution, anger and quiet jubilation. In that last moment before the single light in the audience area was snapped on, we confronted an actress, a woman in her own right, who, after going through an hour and fifteen minutes of another woman’s life, was stepping out of her role and asking the audience to join her in questioning the life of her character. QUESTIONING THE SUICIDE We found that questioning the suicide was the only way to play it accurately. At the same time, we realized how difficult it is to ‘play a question’ on stage. It involves a separation from an action that has been performed, a separation that can be conveyed only if the actor’s presence is strong enough to contradict what has been affirmed. When the audience in our production asked the question: ‘Why did the woman commit suicide?’ only a few of them realized that this was the question being presented to them by the actress herself. While it would be wrong on my part to state that the ending ‘worked’ consistently from night to night, I still believe that our attempt to present the suicide as a question was preferable to at least three other choices. (1) Suicide as a gesture of defiance and self-affirmation. While in a western context, it is possible to imagine a woman taking her life purely as a sign of individual will (‘It’s my life, I’ll do what I want with it’), it would be harder to sustain this interpretation in a world where the very concept of individuality (for a woman, in particular) is denied by society at large.

108 TRANSITION

Moreover, the pressure of responsibilities faced by an Indian woman is considerably greater than for her western counterpart. It is much harder for her to assert herself according to her standards of truth. She is expected to be true by serving others—her parents, her husband, her children, her society. Though Joya Sen was unmarried and parentless, she was still too much a part of middle-class Bengali society to commit suicide as an act of defiance. There was no possibility of derision in her act. Neither was there any hint of narcissism. Joya Sen took her life sedately with an almost total absence of drama. Till the end, her most surprising and radical gesture remained banal. (2) We explored the possibility of Joya Sen preparing for the suicide, and then waiting for the action to be performed or rejected. Conceptually, this seemed like a viable compromise, justified in our not wanting to show a woman kill herself, yet suggesting her proximity to death. However, on confronting this choice, we discovered that this seemingly open ending, apart from being untrue to Kroetz, was also a cop-out. Usha, in particular, felt that we needed to take a stand. My own feeling was that this ending would not leave the audience thinking about the woman’s life, but rather with a trick question—will she or will she not commit suicide? A stronger alternative, I believed, was to show the woman committing suicide, and then questioning her gesture as an actress. (3) Perhaps, the weakest of all choices would be to show Joya Sen going to bed, and then eliminating the suicide altogether. I think that this choice could only trivialize the depiction of banality and ordinariness in the play. It would fail to make an audience question the significance of the woman’s life: they would merely accept it as everyday routine, from which there is no possibility of change. THE ‘IDEOLOGICAL’ OBJECTIONS In Anurodher Asar, Joya Sen changed her life by ending it. Now at one level this is an extreme action, but the suicide as it was represented in the performance was not desperate. If anything the banality was provocative, even shocking. Instead of giving in to her life, her endless routine, Miss Sen seemed to grasp it for the first time in her final moments. One disturbed spectator, a male chauvinist of the first order, strongly criticized our lack of understanding of Bengali women. At the end of the conversation, or rather monologue, he mumbled: ‘Our women are not so strong. They would not be able to do this action.’ I asked for a confirmation: ‘Do you mean that the suicide in the play was a brave action?’ ‘Yes’, he admitted unhappily. ‘Thank you’, I said. I found it harder to talk to some feminists for whom the only solution to Joya Sen’s life seemed to be a participation in their movement. It was pointless to argue that Miss Sen was not political—she was among the last to join the union

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 109

in her office and had no particular faith in the ruling Communist Party in West Bengal. She was not a feminist. ‘Then she has to be educated’, was the rejoinder. On considering the rationales against suicide offered by some Bengali intellectuals, I realized how easy it is to generalize about human beings. Joya Sen was not viewed by these intellectuals as a woman, but rather as a case study, a problem, a class. She was not seen in her own right as she was, but as she should have been according to the premises of an ideology. I discovered that the people who did not want Joya Sen to commit suicide wanted her to live according to their ideologies, their fictions of how people should live, their formulae for a healthy, well-adjusted, socially responsible life. In this context, the power of suicide in our play as a theatrical gesture was that it challenged these assumptions of societal norms, these fabrications of health and community. Having attempted to clarify the validity of suicide in our production, I am prepared to admit that Request Concert may not be the ideal play through which to represent the state of women in contemporary Indian society. I can see the need for a more direct, militant, propagandist theatre that deals specifically with issues of the day. But I strongly believe that there is a place for Anurodher Asar in the theatrical culture of Calcutta today, and that it exposes inner areas of reality and consciousness that an ostensibly ‘political’ theatre fails to confront. I will be blunt: our play was strong precisely because it depicted what most Marxists fail to acknowledge—loneliness. This seemingly bourgeois malady is a reality that has to be confronted in our process of changing society. The human psyche is neither constant nor anonymous. In our ceaseless analyses of how and why people suffer, it is necessary to acknowledge the pain within people. Anurodher Asar was about this pain, this inner silence that we are compelled to live with from day to day, while the world goes on around us. THE ‘SPARK’ OF LONELINESS Loneliness was the spark that ignited our production. It came from Usha herself. When I first met her, it was very rushed, intense. We had just dropped Manuel at Howrah Station and were driving back to Calcutta, almost shouting to be heard over the maelstrom of traffic. ‘Why do you want to do this play?’ I asked her. We had barely talked about it for an hour. Usha looked at me directly, and then, with a total absence of sentiment or selfpity, she said, ‘You see, I am so lonely’. I was struck by her remark; it was the last thing that I had expected to hear from a committed theatre worker, known for her drive and organization both as a professor and a director of social plays. And yet, in these words–‘I am so lonely’–I heard an affirmation of what most women conceal (or are made to conceal) through their lives. I felt a tremendous courage in Usha for daring to admit her loneliness, particularly in a society where women are not assumed to be lonely (‘they are too busy for that’), or if they are, then ‘something must be wrong with them’. The voice

110 TRANSITION

I heard in Usha’s words was not a plea. It demanded to be heard. ‘See me. Understand me. There’s so much I have to say. I must say it’ I am lonely—it was the beginning of our thoughts on Request Concert in Calcutta. In our meetings with Bengali women from various sections of society, notably lower-middle-class working women from Howrah, the loneliness of women seemed to be the underlying force of their solidarity and struggle. More than me, it was Manuel who really interacted with these women, living with their families and observing their daily routine. Strangely enough, the women were more prepared to reveal to him (a white male) than to Bengali men what was at the root of their frustrations: the difficulties relating to their marriage because of the scarcity of money; the frustration of being educated women who are, nonetheless, treated like servants at home; the shame of seeing women of their own age resorting to prostitution for economic survival. The problems went very deep, and the solutions were not in sight. What existed was a struggle, the beginnings of a truly indigenous women’s movement that has spread to almost all parts of India, both in the urban and rural sectors. Only in this struggle can one find hope for women in India today. Almost three years later, Usha and I revived Request Concert in the village of Trilockchandrapur in the Burdwan district of West Bengal. We had been invited by our friends in Reviving Theatre to see their work in the villages, and in response, we felt it was only appropriate to show our own work in the spirit of a theatrical ‘barter’. For a show that started at 11.30 p.m., after we had seen three local productions, it really surprised me how Request Concert was able to hold the attention of the rural spectators. We performed in a shed, incorporating the immediacy of the environment into the inner score of the performance. Here there were no traffic sounds of Kasba, only the pure silence of the Bengal countryside, punctuated with the unearthly sounds of Anurodher Asar. In this altered environment, it was enlightening to see how Usha modified her performance, without compromising on its energy and stillness. In the absence of props and furniture, apart from the barest necessities, she focused on the intrinsically Bengali ethos of her character. More memorably, she found herself questioning the suicide in an altogether unprecedented manner. She contemplated the pills for almost three minutes, internalizing the possibility of suicide with a perceptible sense of danger. Then, finally, she drank a glass of water to the very last drop, wiped her mouth, stood up and left the performing space. This crucial desire to live, which had been confronted hypothetically in the earlier production, had now asserted itself. And there was nothing that Usha could do but respond to its inner necessity. Theatre is always in the process of changing; to ‘fix’ its choices is to be totally untrue to the mutations of history and consciousness.

REQUEST CONCERT IN CALCUTTA 111

After the performance, it was moving to see Usha, still in the glow of her performance, speaking to the spectators. One middle-aged Santhal woman stands out in my mind. She was even more still than Usha had been on stage. Standing with an upright back, she radiated strength and resilience through her very bearing. ‘I understood what you were doing’, she told Usha with total directness. In the intimate silence that followed between the women, transcending the difference of class and education, one sensed an inner world that brought these women together. I am happy to see how Request Concert has served as a catalyst in widening Usha’s world of theatre. Today she is one of the most active directors and actresses in Calcutta. Most recently, she has staged a spirited adaptation of one of Mahasweta Devi’s stories, Rudali, which focuses on the struggle of professional women mourners, who earn their living by wailing at funerals. Clearly, this is a deeply ironic text far removed from the condition of Request Concert, where the woman is permitted a discreet touch of celebration as she takes her own life. Despite the obvious differences in the political orientation of these two texts, Usha nonetheless acknowledges how closely they are linked in her own search as a theatre person for consciousness and different idioms of resistance. Today, it is possible to see how Request Concert provided her with a point of departure for a process of learning that continues.

112

Chapter 7 Request Concert in Bombay

Bombay was the second stop on our theatrical journey. After Calcutta, which continues to resist its reputation as a ‘dying city’, Bombay seems to be flourishing, but only on the surface. It is the Big Apple of India, a throbbing metropolis ridden with problems. Widely recognized as the financial capital of India, it controls 40 per cent of the country’s industrial capital, 33 per cent of its income tax revenue, and 60 per cent of its customs duty. Money is the presiding deity of Bombay, attracting almost 650 people a day to the city from other parts of India. If this influx continues, the population of the city will increase from 13 million people to 20 million by the turn of the century. In Bombay one can see the consequences of India’s ‘march towards the twenty-first century’. Disparities have widened with the developments in technology and industry. Crorepati people luxuriate in fancy apartments facing the sea which are as expensive as Central Park penthouses in New York City, while the jhopadpatti people still inhabit the largest, most squalid slums in the world. Close to 4.5 million people live on pavements when the monsoons do not flood them out, while slum-dwellers live in spaces averaging 2 metres by 1.6 metres. Despite this acute shortage of space, vast acres of land remain vacant in and around the city, strategically controlled by politicians, businessmen and building contractors. Even by New York standards, Bombay is heartless. The city thrives on a drive and efficiency that are not to be found anywhere else in India. Even corruption is efficient in Bombay: you may have to pay your share of bribes and ‘black money’ to get your work done, but it will be done efficiently. In Calcutta, on the other hand, you may make a ‘payment’ to pay your taxes, and nothing is likely to happen for months. Bombay encourages its people to be entirely pragmatic about profiteering and promoting self-interest. Only the toughest survive in this jungle of cities—a free-for-all inviting the crudest capitalist instincts to compete for maximum profits at minimal expense. With this overpoweringly commercial mentality, it is not surprising that the culture in the city is controlled by businesses, industries and financial speculators. Advertising agencies (more dominant here than anywhere else in India) control the tastes of the people with an increasingly seductive rigour. This has resulted in an increasing homogenization of a culture that rejects true

114 REQUEST CONCERT IN BOMBAY

cosmopolitan values. The varied cultures of distinct communities in the city are being flattened out by dominant images on the media—images relating to modernization, society life, entertainment and fashion that are glamorized as icons of progress. To avoid the structures of this commercial world, Manuel and I resolved not to seek sponsorship for our production from any industry or advertising agency. We were also determined to work outside the fashionable cultural centres in the city. So it was fortunate that we met Arvind and Sulabha Deshpande, two highly respected actors and directors in the Marathi theatre. Unfortunately, Arvind passed away shortly after the production was staged. Sulabha works in television and film, but continues to support a non-commercial, ‘serious’ theatre, socially responsible and responsive to new forms and ideas. Their group Avishkar (which also conducts workshops in adult education and stages some imaginative dance-dramas for children) was based in an atmospheric old school, the Chhabildas Boys’ High School, whose solid architecture offers a strong contrast to the jerry-built, high-rise apartment buildings in Bombay. The very location of Chhabildas in the earthy, bustling area of Dadar (very similar to Kasba in Calcutta) made us feel instantly at home. The onslaught of television is perhaps more perceptible in Bombay than anywhere else in India. It coexists with the ever-popular commercial Hindi film, which, despite recent vulnerabilities and economic problems, continues to dominate people’s thought and actions. When I first reflected on the Bombay production of Request Concert, I was compelled to think of this film industry, the largest in the world, which has spawned more myths and propaganda through song, dance, melodrama and sheer idiocy than any other art form in India. To do Request Concert in Bombay one would have to be exceptionally fastidious not to take this ‘art form’ seriously, for its very vulgarity is the source of its power, its stereotypes deeply entrenched in Indian myths and fictions. I wanted the woman in the Bombay production to somehow reflect the power of this industry through her psychology and state of being. Through this industry, I also wanted to confront the other tensions in the city that make life in Bombay a sheer struggle for survival. UMADEVI: A JUNIOR ARTIST IN BOMBAY It was Sulabha who chose to focus on the life of a junior artist (an extra) in the Hindi film industry. This is a highly degraded profession that leaves a woman entirely vulnerable to the manipulations of her agent and producers. Not unlike a prostitute, a female junior artist is compelled, for the most part, to sell her body in order to compete in the market only to receive ‘bit parts’ in crowd sequences ranging from opulent, garishly decorated party scenes to brawls outside slums. In most cases, the junior artist does not speak. She is simply positioned by the director—more precisely, her body is angled. If she has more influence, she is

TRANSITION 115

capable of getting a speaking role, a one-line passing comment or retort in a crowd scene. For her muteness, she receives 75 rupees a day, for her voice 150. She is lucky if she works for ten to fifteen days in the month. While this enables her to earn a fairly reasonable salary compared to working women in the unorganized sector, she incurs major expenses for her make-up and toiletry, and even has to provide for her own costumes. The union does not help. Most junior artists come to Bombay from various urban and mofussil areas in Maharashtra and other parts of India. Not unlike chorus girls in the American musical theatre, they are lured by the possibilities of stardom, but most never achieve the status of ‘character actors’. They age in their professions as extras – spare parts in a mammoth industry controlled by men. Apart from their sexual humiliations, they are demeaned in the most everyday situations at work. For instance, they are never allowed to eat with the stars and film crew, but must bring their own meagre lunches (or dinners, depending on their shift) in tiffin boxes. They are herded on cue for their crowd scenes, and segregated in claustrophobic rooms for their make-up and costuming. Yet, when a producer or actor takes a passing fancy to one of these ‘girls’, she is summarily escorted to his suite. As a senior actress, Sulabha had naturally observed her junior-artist colleagues at work. As a woman, she was able to understand the intensity of their humiliation and its consequences on their behaviour and attitudes. She instinctively knew their craving for contacts and ‘phoren’ things (perfumes, cosmetics, gadgets, whatever—Bombay is the centre for smuggled goods in India). What I valued about Sulabha’s observations was her refusal to idealize the junior artists, despite their oppression. She was prepared to accept their vulgarity and opportunism. In one of our first discussions, we realized that while the life of a junior artist was appropriate to explore in the socio-economic context of Bombay, it was (on the surface, at least) at odds with the character depicted in Kroetz’s play. The sexual repression of Fraulein Rasch was easily transferred in our interpretation of Joya Sen in Calcutta, but it could not be applied to Umadevi (the ‘profession name’ given to her character by Sulabha). Unlike Miss Sen, Umadevi was no virgin. She had been used by men from the very start of her career, when she had come to Bombay from Satara, a town in South-West Maharashtra. But now, at the age of 40, she was in a position to control her exploitation by men. To put it more bluntly, she no longer had to sleep with men at the instigation of her agent. She could lead a celibate life, focusing on her work and those everyday responsibilities that constitute life— notably, eating, drinking and sleeping. We could have chosen to focus on the life of a clerk in Bombay, but this would have involved a repetition of some of the motifs used in our exploration of Joya Sen’s character. I felt that the link with the Hindi film industry was important because it could reveal the surrender of the character’s individuality to the attitudes and gestures propagated by the industry.

116 REQUEST CONCERT IN BOMBAY

I was interested in exploring the indistinguishability between these gestures and their ‘real-life’ equivalents. When Manuel wrote to me from Calcutta that the character’s profession seemed too ‘creative’ to convey the banality of Kroetz’s play, I wrote back that Umadevi’s ‘acting’ (both on film and in life) had almost completely annihilated her creativity. She was, perhaps, more mechanized than any bank clerk or stenographer. THE ‘PROBLEM’ OF CLEANLINESS As we delved into the life of a junior artist, we were compelled to face some technical problems while confronting Kroetz’s text. The most glaring obstacle was the almost antiseptic cleanliness of Fraulein Rasch (which Kroetz links to her repression). I wondered how cleanliness could be depicted in Umadevi’s life—it almost seemed an alien issue so far as the junior artist is concerned. At a very general level, I found the Marathi woman a great deal more practical and down-to-earth than her Bengali counterpart. It was a relief to hear Sulabha speak so naturally about her character’s toilet habits and use of the mori. In Calcutta production, Manuel and I had received much fastidious criticism about Joya Sen’s use of the mori. ‘She would never spit in it’, some upper-middle-class spectators had declared. In contrast, Sulabha said that her character would not only use the mori to spit out her tobacco (to which she was addicted), but would also use it to urinate in at night. Umadevi may not have been as clean as Fraulein Rasch or Joya Sen, but she was clean in her own cultural context. What we had to explore was whether she was more clean than her colleagues at work. Sulabha instinctively felt that Umadevi would never wipe the window sill after coming home from work as Fraulein Rasch does in her apartment: but she could clean the mirror on her dressing table with an almost narcissistic care. Similarly, while she would be fairly casual, almost rough, with her everyday clothes (instead of a sari, she wore a batik maxi for most of the production), she was more caring about the ‘party costume’ in which she entered (a bright salwar-kameez in safron and orange). Against her will, she was compelled to fold this costume meticulously—after all, it had cost her much more than she could afford. We found that Umadevi had to be cleaner than a typical junior artist, whose rooms (from what we learned about them) are frequently cluttered with the odds and ends of their profession—magazines lying on the floor, make-up bottles strewn on the dressing table, unwashed dishes in the mori. In such a messy environment, the precision in Kroetz’s play would have been lost. If Umadevi had to live within the constraints of Request Concert, she could not be a slob. Instead of inhibiting her, we found that these constraints defined her better. They also helped us to avoid the clichés surrounding the life of a ‘typical’ junior artist. As we gradually entered in the inner world of Umadevi, we questioned what was ‘typical’ in her life. Ultimately, we found that she was a woman in her

TRANSITION 117

own right who happened to be a junior artist. While she shared the dominant traits of her profession, she defined them in her own way. Once again, I realized that one cannot generalize about human beings in the theatre. You can study behavioural patterns and general characteristics about a group of people, but ultimately you have to create one person in one place at a particular time. A biography cannot be predetermined through generalities and statistics. It must live on its own terms within the structure of a performance text. EMBROIDERING THE TEXT To challenge Sulabha in the early rehearsals, which were spent entirely in discussing the social background of the character, I asked her: ‘Can you imagine Umadevi embroidering or stitching anything?’ The action seemed so contrived in its femininity for a junior artist to perform night after night as part of her everyday routine. Sulabha thought with her characteristic candour, then said: ‘She could be stitching some jhablas (shifts) for her sister’s newly born daughter.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Umadevi has a family?’ ‘Yes’, she said, ‘I support them. They continue to live in Satara. Every month I send them 500 rupees by money order. That’s slightly less than half of my monthly salary. Still they are not satisfied. They hate me for what I do, yet depend on me to live. I am not welcome there, but it is my duty to support them.’ This revelation of her character’s biography naturally interrupted my questions on embroidery. Umadevi’s family was more important As a junior artist in Bombay, she lived in isolation from her family. Her work (sporadic and dependent on the whims of producers) did not permit her to visit Satara regularly. Despite this physical distance, however, she was still linked to her family economically, providing for them every month. It is likely that this financial support was one of the main reasons why Umadevi had never married: her family had avoided arranging a marriage for her so that they could continue using her as a source of income. While resenting this financial support, an obligation intensified by the death of her parents, Umadevi is obliged to perform it for her own sense of well-being. ‘Why jhablas?’ I asked Sulabha, returning to my thoughts on embroidery. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Umadevi’s sister has given birth to a child. It’s one more mouth to feed, but it’s a child. When Umadevi stitches for it, she could imagine that it is her own child. She could also show her resentment for the family through it.’ ‘What else could you stitch?’ I asked her, calling attention to the fact that the woman in Kroetz’s play stitches a wall-hanging for herself. It is a product of many hours of work—meaningless, unimaginative work (Fraulein Rasch merely copies a pattern to make the wall-hanging). I feared that the jhablas would not sufficiently convey Umadevi’s need to pass the time mechanically.

118 REQUEST CONCERT IN BOMBAY

‘I could tack a border on to a sari’ Sulabha suggested, ‘or I could stitch myself a choli blouse.’ I wavered, realizing that such choices could only enhance the self-image of the character. ‘The jhablas link you closely to your family. They could highlight your oppression suggestively.’ Once we decided on this choice, we had to create a text that would support the presence of the family, invisible yet real. Likewise, we had to elaborate on the details in Umadevi’s profession. On her entrance she was laden with the paraphernalia of her job—make-up box, costume bag, tiffin box and film magazine, in addition to her shopping bag. The first thing she did after putting these things down was to read her agent’s note—though there was no way in which we could specify that the note was from her agent. Yet if words are more explanatory than gestures, gestures can be more revealing: after reading the note silently, Umadevi would look at the nail polish on her fingers, and grimace. Later in the play, she would notice her nails again and mechanically sit down to remove the polish. This was followed by the desultory packing of her costume for the next day’s shooting. It was obvious to the Bombay audience that she was playing a jhopadpatti character not only from the removal of her nail polish, but from the selection of her costume—a tattered sari which she deliberately tore around her breast (even as a slum-dweller, a junior artist has to look attractive). This preparation was completed by a ‘destitute look’ into the mirror, the kind of vacuous expression that one can see on film hoardings all over India. It was through such links that the professional demands of the character were clarified. Reading of agent’s message—selection of old sari—tearing of sari— destitute look—noticing of nail polish—removal of polish—placing of sari and old wig in costume bag—positioning of bag and make-up box near door for next day’s work. Obviously, these details were additions to the mechanical, almost colourless actions depicted in Kroetz’s text as Fraulein Rasch prepares to sleep. Like the German woman, Umadevi brushed her teeth, plaited her hair and wound the alarm clock, but in addition she had her own actions to perform in accordance with her profession. In Umadevi’s world, the family and profession were dominant realities that were very much in the foreground of her life. They were not absences against which her loneliness could be highlighted. She had more to fight against than Joya Sen, and consequently, the emphasis of the performance was not so much on the inner silence of the woman as on her struggle to exist in a world of conflicting values. TENSION AND RHYTHMS I wanted this struggle to be felt at almost every level of the production. The soundtrack, for instance, was a great deal more turbulent and jarring than the warm, environmental sounds of the Calcutta production. Popular Hindi film

TRANSITION 119

songs underscored the traffic sounds to produce a tension against which Umadevi asserted her own rhythms. These personal rhythms underwent a transition in the course of the production. Till she settled down to eat her meal, Umadevi’s rhythms were filmi for the part, counterpointing the Bombay city sounds filtering through the window. But gradually, with the playing of Marathi songs on the radio programme Aapli Awad, Umadevi’s inner rhythms were asserted more naturally. The most striking occasion when music synchronized with Umadevi’s innerrhythms was when she lay down in bed after her meal and held her two-in-one transistor to her chest. In this sequence, played with a complete lack of inhibition by Sulabha, the music almost appeared to emerge from Umadevi’s body: technology became part of her being, the source of her inmost fantasies. In contrast, Joya Sen’s relationship to music had been much less physical. Her old-fashioned radio remained in one spot over the showcase: she only touched it when she switched it on and off. But the mobility of the two-in-one in the Bombay production, so light and attractive in appearance, greatly facilitated Sulabha’s relationship to the music. Through her caressing of the instrument, she was able to convey an almost masochistic dependence on it. So dominant was the role of music and sound in the production that silence was almost overwhelmed. The production was, predominantly, loud. ‘When is Umadevi ever silent?’ Manuel asked me on one of the final rehearsals—a pertinent question, for Umadevi sang almost compulsively when she was cooking, undressing or removing a spot from the mirror. She seemed to be afraid of accepting her inner silence. Her gestures were also rougher (and consequently louder) than the docile movements of Joya Sen, and I encouraged Sulabha to accentuate these tensions in her performance. Gradually, we began to discover an order within the disorder of Umadevi’s gestures, as we explored how her seeming randomness is ritualized. Unlike Joya Sen (or Fraulein Rasch), Umadevi could never finish one action completely before going on to the next. She would start chopping the onions for dinner, then suddenly recollect that the TV was on. Almost in a reflex action she would shut it off and then continue to chop the onions. This breaking of her gestures was resolutely sustained in her rhythmic patterns. Her randomness became mechanized. Ultimately, she had to do whatever Joya Sen and Fraulein Rasch were compelled to do—cook, eat, stitch, sleep and commit suicide. The sequence of these actions was rigorously maintained, but the rhythms within these actions were her own. What I discovered while observing Umadevi’s rhythms is that they externalized the inner disjunctive logic in Kroetz’s text more sharply than those of Joya Sen. The Bengali woman had a very settled rhythm that was broken abruptly now and again: she almost plodded from one task to the next. In contrast, Sulabha appeared to be all over the place: it seemed as if she were littering the floor with her scattered gestures, which she was then compelled to pick up.

120 REQUEST CONCERT IN BOMBAY

Her own disjunctive logic enhanced the non-sequential, disturbed flow of Kroetz’s text. Consequently, Umadevi seemed to work with her text more energetically than Joya Sen. Her randomness was more motivated than Joya Sen’s strangely elusive logic. The overall effect (for me at least) was that I understood Umadevi more clearly than Joya Sen—but, almost as a corollary, she surprised me less. THE VALIDITY OF SUICIDE Significantly, the suicide was less shocking in Bombay than in Calcutta. Fewer people asked ‘Why did the woman commit suicide?’, seeming to accept the validity of Umadevi’s choice. Even the splashing of wine on the table and the subsequent wiping of the wine produced less of a shock than in the Calcutta production. After all, this untidy gesture was less obtrusive when it was made by Umadevi, whose devotion to cleanliness was restricted to her clothes and her dressing table. What did work remarkably well was Sulabha’s performance of the suicide as an act of celebration. Umadevi could actually drink wine instead of the orange squash to which the respectable Joya Sen was confined. As a junior artist, she was bound to have some liquor in her house (carefully locked up in her steel almirah: even Golconda wine is expensive in India). As Umadevi poured the wine into her glass with studied elegance, one felt that this was her final opportunity to play a role. Sulabha savoured every moment. With each sip of the wine she liberated herself from her routine—no more getting up in the morning for an early shift, no more acceptance of insults from her agent and directors, no more submission to family pressures. Finally, she could be herself. However, even in this act of liberation, Umadevi was deluded. Just as Fraulein Rasch’s gestures remain banal till the very end (despite the final look of interest in her face), Umadevi remained imprisoned in her fantasies till almost the very end. The only difference was that she performed these fantasies with more grace than her earlier gestures and postures. She was Umadevi-as-Meena Kumari in her final moments, performing the great tragedy queen who drank herself to death, yet who remains forever apotheosized in her histrionic roles. After playing this dual role, it was necessary for Sulabha simply to play Umadevi, or the play would have become too romantic in its depiction of the suicide. What greatly helped to deromanticize the ending was Umadevi’s spilling of wine on the table, upon which she made a typical ‘Satara expression’ with her mouth, tongue between teeth, that contradicted her filmi élan. The gesture of wiping the wine with her fingers may not have shocked in its ‘untidiness’, but it certainly helped to bring Umadevi back to earth, to the mundane reality of her imminent death. Thereafter, in the final moments of the play, Sulabha drank the rest of the wine as Umadevi, not Meena Kumari. This was followed by a complete break from

TRANSITION 121

the character, as Sulabha asserted her own presence as an actress. She did this more abruptly than Usha, who had questioned the audience with her eyes. For Sulabha, the break needed to be more sharply defined. As she placed the wine glass on the table, she was already stepping out of character. Then she would wipe her face with her hands, as if erasing the performance. Pushing her stool back, she would fold her arms and test the audience as if to say, ‘What’s wrong with this action?’ After a few moments, she would rise and fold her hands in a namaste and casually walk out of the door. It is significant that at the final performance the audience waited until after she had shut the door behind her. Even after breaking from her role, it was not possible to determine whether Sulabha Deshpande was Umadevi or whether she was Sulabha Deshpande in her own right. ACTING IN THE THIRD PERSON In our very first rehearsal, it was clear to me that Sulabha sees a role as a role, not a life-experience. She analyses it, questions it, challenges the playwright’s premises, and then makes her choices to construct a specific interpretation. If this makes her sound too methodical, I should add that the true quality in her acting is her ability to play the same emotion in totally different ways. She likes to challenge herself. Just before entering the stage for a performance, she is capable of determining a new way to play a gesture. But she must know why she is changing the gesture before she does so. This makes her a very rational actress, who has all the techniques to test out contradictory ideas relating to the character. For Sulabha, the challenge was to empathize with Umadevi. She was more prepared to present her almost clinically: playing her in the third person came instinctively to her. It is not surprising, therefore, that the suicide did not seem to disturb Sulabha as a woman: it was simply an action that had to be performed and justified. There was no possibility of identifying with it. When I suggested that the suicide should be played like a question, Sulabha said: ‘This action does not come from the woman. It comes from the playwright’ I was struck by her pragmatic response, so different from Usha’s intense vulnerability. What Sulabha felt about the suicide she kept to herself: what she talked about was how to play it. The mechanics of the action seemed more important to her than the emotion. Like any professional, of course, she knew their interdependence. Structurally, the suicide seems ‘tacked on’ in Koretz’s text, serving as an epilogue to the rest of the play. When the woman goes to bed, she switches off all the lights and there is darkness for a few minutes. In this blank space, all action remains more or less unseen. It seems as if the play has come to an end. Then the woman switches on the table lamp, goes to the bathroom, comes out and takes a sleeping pill. In the very abruptness of these gestures, the play takes on another dimension.

122 REQUEST CONCERT IN BOMBAY

Both Sulabha and I felt that the suicide needed to be broken in some significant ways from the continuum of events. It had to be played within quotation marks. I suggested that the break should come after Umadevi swallows the pills, but Sulabha thought (and rightly so) that it should come much earlier, when she first notices the contents of the pill bottle. With the break, one could almost hear Sulabha saying: ‘Now Umadevi will commit suicide according to the instructions of Franz Xaver Kroetz.’ A sharp look at the audience was followed by a total absorption in the act of committing suicide. While swallowing each pill, Sulabha would look directly into the eyes of individual spectators. Clearly, they were Sulabha Deshpande’s eyes, not Umadevi’s. For some time, I accepted this presentation of the suicide as unsettling. Then it seemed to become increasingly self-conscious. I began to question the necessity of breaking the action at all. ‘What are you telling the audience?’ I asked Sulabha. The more I probed the question, the more I realized that she did not fundamentally disagree with the choice of suicide as a means to end a mechanized life. I had assumed that she would find it ‘defeatist’, even unethical. In my own attempt to question the suicide, I had failed to accept its necessity to the actress representing it. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ was Sulabha’s question to the audience, not ‘Why am I doing this?’ For a time, there was an additional complication. This had to do with the levels of breaking away from the character. When Sulabha first looked at the audience after inspecting the pills, we knew that she had broken out of character. Her sharp look was resolutely abrupt. However, when she started to swallow the pills, she seemed to be more in character. But if she was in character, then how could she look at the audience so questioningly? To what extent can a character be aware of an audience? It seemed to me that Umadevi could not question the audience while taking her life, but Sulabha Deshpande could. All breakings of action, therefore, had to be played out of character. ‘CONTROLLING’ THE PERFORMANCE Sulabha clarified the three moments in the performance when she was out of character. The first occurred almost in the middle of the performance, just after she had washed her corset and was about to begin her stitching. Here, Sulabha simply acknowledged the presence of the audience as voyeurs in the dark. ‘Don’t just look at me’, she seemed to say, ‘Think about this woman’s life’. The second moment occurred when she noticed the pills. Here, with her sharp look at the audience, she asked: ‘What if I take these pills? How will my life change?’ And finally, after she had swallowed all the pills, she was most emphatically out of character, challenging the audience to question the validity of her action.

TRANSITION 123

‘Why are you so self-conscious in those last moments?’ I asked Sulabha, calling attention to the ‘natural’ gestures—wiping of hands over face, brushing back of hair—that she repeatedly made after breaking out of character. ‘That’s because I’m acting,’ Sulabha answered. ‘But I want you to be yourself’, I urged her. ‘That’s not possible’, she responded. ‘So long as Sulabha Deshpande is on stage, she will always be an actress. The Sulabha Deshpande at home is another woman.’ I thought that she was equivocating. So I challenged her further to be true to herself. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘You want me to be Sulabha in the last moments. Just be myself. Then let me speak. Why should I keep silent after the performance?’ In principle, she was absolutely right. By placing constraints on her, I was involuntarily perpetuating her role as an actress. If she had to be herself, then she needed no directional constraints. She would have to do whatever she was compelled to do after each performance. In this context, I had to question my own role as a director in concretizing the mechanization of the character. Was I not ‘mechanizing’ Sulabha as well as the context of acting? Did I not make her repeat the same gestures rehearsal after rehearsal? Was it possible, I wondered, for any performance to escape the principle of repetition on which theatre is based? In no play within my experience has this principle been more sharply tested. The very life of the woman in Request Concert is a repetition, an endless cycle of actions and gestures imposed on her by society. Night after night, she has repeated the same gestures. The actress representing her has to create her own repetitive patterns. And the director has to synthesize the repetition of both the character and the actress. The task is not without contradictions. By controlling the performance, was I not participating in the repetition? Was Sulabha more free than Umadevi? As much as I wanted Sulabha to do what she wanted to do, my very presence (and Manuel’s, when he participated in the last week of rehearsal) inevitably served to mediate the performance and perpetuate its repetitions. For the first time I understood the value of Artaud’s statement: the theatre is the only place where the same gesture can never be repeated the same way twice. As a representation, theatre has no choice but to re-present itself from performance to performance. Last night’s performance provides the ashes as it were from which tonight’s performance can grow. Theatre is never-endingly alive, constantly dying, constantly living. CONFRONTING THE FIRST PERSON For all its meticulous routine, Request Concert had to live. It had to be more human than the dehumanized life of Fraulein Rasch. During one of the final rehearsals, I realized that the performance was exceptionally clear, but I didn’t really feel anything for Umadevi. In fact, I didn’t know who she was. What I saw was a

124 REQUEST CONCERT IN BOMBAY

very professionally executed set of gestures and attitudes bearing on Umadevi’s life. The human being was missing. In one of our frank post-rehearsal discussions, Manuel told Sulabha: ‘You seem to be doing so much, I have no time to feel anything. Why are you rushing through the stitching? In the Calcutta production, five minutes of stitching felt like half-an-hour. You forgot time. Here your five minutes feels like five minutes. The more you rush, the less I am with you.’ At this point, Sulabha shot one of her candid looks in my direction. She had every right to be indignant about this consequence in her performance of my urging her to edit the vacant moments in her performance score. The running time of the play was about one hour and thirty minutes, fifteen minutes more than the Calcutta production. I had imagined that the Bombay production would take a shorter time than the Calcutta one because the pace of life in the city and the energies of the character were faster, more hectic. But what I had failed to accept was that the performance text of the Bombay production was considerably ‘heavier’ than its Calcutta counterpart. The elaborations on Umadevi’s family and profession had contributed to the details in the text. Now, after seeing Sulabha’s performance in the last rehearsals, I realized that Request Concert does not work if the audience does not participate in the sense of time passing. They have to be with the woman in her perfectly normal working day, sharing the minutiae of her life. I realized now that the vacant moments in Sulabha’s score, the blank transitions, had to be lingered over, not rushed. In the next rehearsal, Sulabha surprised us by playing the role deeply from within herself. It was almost as if she had submerged the third-person. In the process, she discovered an emotional affinity with Umadevi that she had not previously felt. While drinking her tea, for instance, she no longer posed as a society lady or model on a television commercial. Or if she did, we no longer noticed these poses as poses—they had entered the physical being of her character. Previously, while she drank her tea, we would think: ‘Oh, she imagines that she’s Zeenat Aman on the Taj Mahal Tea commercial.’ Now we focused on the drinking of the tea itself, its relaxing effect and the change in the rhythms of the body. As Sulabha’s performance deepened, she began to empty overt meanings from her gestures. Or to put it differently, she allowed these meanings to sink into the gestures. When she ate her mango after lunch, it no longer seemed as if she were making us see the coarse sensuality of Umadevi’s inner life: she simply ate the mango without calling attention to her fingers grasping the seed. By minimizing such details in her performance, Sulabha began to feel her own actions. She no longer felt the pressure to say something through her gestures all the time. The more she lived them, the more they spoke for themselves. In retrospect, I think that it was appropriate in Sulabha’s case to begin with a third-person presentation of the character and then work inwards. It goes without saying that her absorption in the character would have been incomplete without a

TRANSITION 125

critical understanding of Umadevi’s ethos, social position and energy. The critique of the character had to be integrated within its being on stage. Kroetz, one might say, requires his actors to act in the first and third person at the same time. They must be consciously unconscious of the significance of their gestures, not only in relation to their characters’ inner lives, but in the larger context of the world they live in. THE AUDIENCE AND THE SPACE Sulabha needed more time to get the exact balance between the first and third person in her presentation of Umadevi, but what she achieved in the final performance was truly commendable. She made us feel and think about the character at the same time, which is not as simple as it sounds. The loneliness of Umadevi was, perhaps, less poignant than Joya Sen’s but it underscored a wider range of emotions and thoughts where the struggle to live clearly dominated the need to end a mechanized life. I was particularly happy to see how some leading feminists of the Women’s Centre in Bombay reacted to the performance. They identified closely with the relentless pressure of Umadevi’s routine, the household work that has yet to be acknowledged as work by the majority of men in the world. Umadevi’s suicide was also accepted as a viable choice, precisely because it was not represented in a melodramatic or defeatist light. The resolution of the suicide appealed to the feminists—or, if not appealed, certainly provided them with a context in which to think about that choice. The final breaking away from the character by Sulabha also helped to sharpen the audience’s critical perspective on the play. ‘Those last moments gave us time to think about the play’, one of the women revealed to me. As Sulabha asserted her own presence as an actress, the lights in the audience area gradually came on till the spectators were looking at Sulabha as clearly as they noticed the people around them. When Sulabha eventually left the ‘room’, I noticed that the audience was still seated for a few seconds. My feeling was that they would have continued sitting for a longer time if two or three people had not risen. Then, immediately, everyone got up, almost in one movement. This made me aware how mechanized we are in the theatre. Not only are our actors conditioned to enter and exit on cue, but our audiences, too, have been reduced to mechanical responses. Like the woman in Request Concert, their creative impulses have been constrained by modes of behaviour instituted by cultural establishments. I think that one of the achievements of the Bombay production was that in a very small way it gave people an experience of the theatre that made them think about theatre. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it’, was one of the most common reactions.

126 REQUEST CONCERT IN BOMBAY

This response related not only to the performance, but to its situation in the larger performance space of Chhabildas Boys’ High School. When the audience entered the large hall, they found the scattered remnants of a temple set. We had not planned this ourselves: it so happened that the school authorities had lent the hall to a film crew for the shooting of a mythological film. The spectators of our production had to walk through this ‘temple’ before they reached a black curtain behind which they saw a room on a stage, carpeted with durries. Once seated in this space, they realized that they were looking into another ‘room’, only this one was completely furnished with dressing table and bed. It was Manuel’s brainwave to enhance the aura of the room in the audience area, which we achieved by opening the windows in the back wall of the stage. These windows in turn overlooked Chhabildas Road, a lane of bustling activity where laughter and the shouts of the street vendors blend harmoniously. We also hung a few pictures on the wall, portraits of national heroes — notably the famous Maharashtrian political visionary, Dr Ambedkar, whose bluesuited, bespectacled image is deeply entrenched in the Marathi psyche. Overall, the effect of the space was to make the audience feel that they were sitting in an extension of the ‘room’ in the performance area. But as Manuel pointed out: ‘There is no way that this ‘room’ where Umadevi lives is going to be a room. The very fact that it’s on a stage is going to make it theatrical.’ More precisely, Umadevi’s ‘room’ was created within the wings of the stage, that part of any theatre which is invariably concealed, lost in darkness. This area was the performance space for our production, a peculiarly intimate space with an unmistakably theatrical aura. Umadevi’s mori concealed the theatre switchboard. It is no wonder that with such a performance space the production resonated differently in Bombay than in Calcutta. Here in Chhabildas, the theatricality of the space strongly coloured the intimacy of the performance. LEAVING BOMBAY Time: it always seems to be running out in Bombay. On my final trip to Dadar, I was a few seconds late in getting out of the moving train. Before I could throw myself out, the horde of incoming passengers just poured into the compartment and I was pushed all the way back by the sheer proximity of their bodies. It almost seemed as if I had lost my legs. Pushing my way out of the train again at the next stop, I experienced the sheer physical struggle that Umadevi, along with millions of Bombayites, underwent every day of her working life. I felt guilty. From this jungle of cities, I would be taking a break. The next production was going to be far away from any city. Request Concert in Madras would be performed in an open-air theatre near a beach and on full moon night. As I walked to Chhabildas for the last time, just past the overhead bridge near Dadar Station, where thousands of people seem to be spewed from the gates, I felt the weight of the world around me. For a moment I panicked and stood still.

TRANSITION 127

Then I was shoved into the crowds and began to move again. Like Umadevi, I was alive.

128

Chapter 8 Request Concert in Madras

I was in Bombay completing the Marathi adaption of Request Concert while Manuel was already in Madras beginning to work on the play with Chandralekha. Widely recognized as one of India’s most radical (and, necessarily, controversial) dancers and choreographers, Chandralekha has also written poems and a novella, designed exhibitions and posters, produced a film on dance for BBC with Merce Cunningham, Andy Warhol and David Tudor, travelled widely all over the world and interacted with women’s groups throughout India. She is that rare person who cannot be imitated because she is entirely herself. A free spirit, a totally centred woman. Quite simply, there is no one like her. With Chandra (as we got to know her), it was inevitable that our work would be challenged on the most basic levels of intercultural thought and practice. She was going to dance the silent text of Franz Xaver Kroetz, using the rarefied gestures and symbols of Bharat Natyam. Within the contours of this classical dance tradition, Kroetz would have to be scrutinized from a deeply feminine and Indian perspective. I was not altogether surprised therefore to receive Manuel’s long and disturbed letters from Madras during the first weeks of rehearsal. As a dancer, not an actress, Chandra was instinctively repulsed by realism on stage. I was amused to hear from Manuel how she was incapable of performing anything close to real life. Even switching on a light or opening a door proved to be an ordeal for her to perform. Her very walk on stage was a kind of a dance. ‘Can’t you just walk’ I could hear Manuel bark. ‘No’, I heard Chandra snapping back at him. ‘I’m a dancer.’ In retrospect, Manuel described their first week of rehearsals as a battle of wills. He wanted her to act; she insisted on dancing. He wanted her to root Kroetz’s character within a concrete social context, and she wanted to stare into space and focus on her inner energies. CONFRONTING CHANDRA ‘She is shying away from any concrete description of the character’, Manuel wrote to me. ‘Questions concerning the social class, the upbringing, the profession of the character, what she likes and dislikes are of no interest to her. No answers.

130 TRANSITION

She expressed again that she would like to portray just a woman, an Indian woman. She might be single or not, might be upper, middle or working class; she might live in the city, suburbs or country, but she is an Indian woman.’ At first, this seemingly ahistorical approach to dance surprised me, because Chandra has reflected deeply on the social context of Indian dance. Moreover, as one of the guiding spirits of the feminist movement in India, she had been particularly concerned about cultural issues which are so frequently neglected in women’s conferences and seminars. Though she may not call herself a feminist— she is too individual to be classified under any category—her awareness of social oppression, her distrust of the cult of motherhood and her own workshops with women from various communities in dance, printmaking, poster design: all these activities have contributed towards her consciousness of women as ‘producers of men…among other things’. In this context, I found it somewhat strange that she did not want to analyse Kroetz’s character from a feminist perspective. Only later did I realize that Chandra cannot view women as characters; she sees them essentially as parts of WOMAN. What matters to her are not facts but essences of womanhood. Her interest in doing Request Concert was not to find a Tamil equivalent for the German woman, but to explore those aspects of womanhood dramatized in Kroetz’s text that she identified with and could speak through. Wisely, during the first rehearsals, she did not settle for the obvious choices, preferring silence to discussion. Like all dancers, she thought physically, responding to the energies within herself. Energy: this is the crucial word for understanding Chandra, both as a woman and a dancer. In fact, to dichotomize ‘woman’ and ‘dancer’ in her case is simply pedantic. As a woman, she has to dance. That is one activity she cannot give up because it is part of her being. Though she rarely performs for an audience, her own dance in everyday life continues. Without a constant renewal of her body’s rhythms, flow, and energies, she would be ‘finished’, as she candidly states—or, if she continued to live, she would be no better than the character in Kroetz’s play: a zombie, a mechanized human being. BREAKTHROUGHS One of the first movements that appears to have crystallized during the early rehearsals was what Manuel described as ‘the empty movement, the body moving as if it were remote controlled: mindless, mechanical movement directed from outside’. Reflecting on this movement, I began to wonder about its possibilities of exploration through Bharat Natyam. The ethos of the movement, centering in the urban realities of mechanization and banality, seemed completely to contradict the celebration of the cosmos, which all classical Indian dance is said to affirm in different ways. I feared that zombie mudras (gestures) would be ludicrous to watch. They could make the audience laugh, but worse still, they could be aestheticized in a way that would

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 131

trivialize the oppression depicted in Kroetz’s play. I cautioned Manuel against an aestheticization of the commonplace: and yet, was it possible for any Bharat Natyam performance to counter aesthetics with its rarefied gestures and symbols? My questions seemed to intensify Manuel’s attachment to the real. The breakthrough came one morning when he watched Chandra at a training session with her teacher. After she had gone through her exercises and movements, they began to talk about the bases of Bharat Natyam. What underlies the mudras? Where do they ultimately come from? What are their primary energies? ‘I learned’, Manuel wrote, ‘how all the movements of Bharat Natyam came from observations of real-life gestures. It seems that whenever you are in doubt about any movement, then you have to refer back to the real world.’ I think that Manuel needed this confirmation in order to accept the necessity of abstraction in dance. He no longer felt the need to question why Chandra moved or gesticulated in a certain way: these were her own responses to a highly codified performance tradition that she had studied for years under the guidance of Guru Ellappa Pillai. Neither Manuel nor I, therefore, was in a position to question the minutiae of Chandra’s art, but what we could do was to situate it meaningfully within the larger, theatrical context suggested by Kroetz’s play. Chandra came from the world of dance, Manuel and I from the world of theatre. Theatre in dance, dance in theatre: these were the polarities within which the production gradually began to take shape. LEVELS OF NARRATIVE One of the first attempts on Manuel’s part to assert the theatricality of the performance was to get Kroetz’s text translated into Tamil. He then wondered what would happen if this text could be read by a story teller, who would serve to link the worlds of the performer (dance) and the audience (everyday reality). What he had to work out was how the spoken narrative would interrupt the flow of the dance. This was an intricate task, as we discovered later. While I supported the use of the storyteller in principle, I couldn’t help wondering how the German text would sound in Tamil. The translation Manuel had in mind was a literal one of the original German, not its adaptation for an Indian context. In other words, even though Chandra would be cooking, stitching, and eating paan like any Indian woman, the Tamil text would be speaking of a German woman lighting a cigarette, washing her nylon stockings and doing all the things that no Indian woman could do because the context of her world was radically different. I began to understand what Manuel wanted. In our Calcutta and Bombay productions, we had found our own substitutions/additions/deletions/elaborations of Kroetz’s text within the cultural context of a Bengali and Marathi woman. Here in Madras, Manuel wanted to highlight the clash of cultural contexts and its representation within a coherent artistic framework. My problem was with the

132 TRANSITION

mechanics of representing such a clash. Would it be meaningful, or would it just come across like an intercultural gimmick? As we shall examine later, this clash had to be seriously questioned as the rehearsals progressed. For the moment, let us continue reflecting on how the production began to exist on different levels, which seemed to question and occasionally negate each other. Along with the storyteller, Manuel wanted Chandra’s accompanist, Udupi Lakshminarayan, to beat out the rhythms through the performance. He envisioned the musician sitting on the stage, vocalizing the talas (rhythmic patterns) and beating time with a baton on a block of wood. These talas would coexist not only with periodic bursts of the Tamil narrative, but with an electronic soundtrack of city sounds that would filter into the audience from all sides. This soundtrack recording of everyday, oppressive sounds within houses and on streets would counterpoint (‘realistically’) the dance on stage. In addition, Manuel wanted to insert taped soundtracks of the television news and the radio programme which the woman hears during the play. The very thought of hearing Tamil film music in conjunction with Bharat Natyam talas was enough to make me wince. ‘Just be careful’, I warned Manuel, envisioning conservative diehards of the Tamil dance world attacking us for our irreverence. The experimental nature of the production began to hit me long before I participated in the rehearsals myself. I felt that Chandra was exceptionally brave to take on the project, because she more than us was likely to be attacked for desecrating Bharat Natyam in a production where (a) she danced a German silent text; (b) she danced to electronic city sounds, film music and the traditional accompaniment of Bharat Natyam; (c) she focused on unmentionable things like garbage, a pimple and going to the bathroom; and (d) she committed suicide on stage. How would the various levels of narrative in our production—dance, music, words—interrelate, while maintaining their own distinct qualities? To what extent could Bharat Natyam support the social realities depicted in Kroetz’s play? What did we want to learn from the entire experience? These and many other questions were in my mind when I arrived in Madras two weeks before the production opened. ENVIRONMENT It was late in the evening and I was lost. Besant Nagar (where Chandra lives) is rather like a beach-town with identical houses and a lot of sand. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sea. My Tamil taxi-driver, who inevitably spoke more English than Hindi, asked various people for the whereabouts of ‘this Chandralekha’. No one seemed to know her. Desperately, I tried to paint a vivid picture of her appearance: ‘She has flaming white hair, and she’s a dancer.’ No response. Only later when I met Chandra did I realize how closely she guards her privacy. She

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 133

lives anonymously in her home, adjacent to an open-air theatre where she rehearses her performances. ‘I love being alone’, Chandra told me shortly after we met, fully aware that her statement contradicted the depiction of loneliness in Kroetz’s play. ‘When I enter an empty room after coming in from the outside, I often wonder, these shadows dancing on the walls…what were they doing when I was away?’ To be with Chandra is to be in touch with a wide range of perceptions that are integrally related to the body and natural phenomena. Manuel was not waxing eloquent when he confided that his ‘first conversations with Chandra were definitely influenced by the full moon, the eclipse, the ocean, the night sky and the earth. She would not miss seeing one sunrise or moonrise if she could help it.’ Not inappropriately, Request Concert in Madras was scheduled to open on a full moon night. The very environment of Chandralekha’s work contributes to her creativity. She lives near the sea on the corner of Elliots Beach, where the days and nights seem to flow into one another, and you can forget the passing of time. ‘How can you work here?’ the German dancer Suzanne Linke once asked Chandra, ‘It’s too beautiful. Manuel was of the same opinion. Not only did the atmosphere of the open-air theatre radiate harmony, it seemed to contradict the tensions embodied in Kroetz’s play. It was hard to reconcile banality and middle-class materialism with Chandra’s theatre space—so intimate, yet open to the forces of nature. The very proportions of the theatre— modelled on mandala concepts, with its simple rectangular stage, brick wall and tiled roof, flanked by banana trees on either end, with the courtyard spreading out gently like two beautiful arms outstretched—all these architectural elements seemed to be part of an elemental scheme, where the oneness of the universe was affirmed. ‘It’s too aesthetic’, Manuel kept growling, through the last rehearsals of the production. ‘We must do something to if. Somewhat desperately, he went in search of Tamil film posters in the most violent colours that he could find. ‘We’ll be able to displace the harmony’, he thought, ‘if we nail the posters and hoardings along the walls of the theatre.’ Ultimately, we did manage to find a perfectly lurid, cardboard cut-out of what looked like a female wrestler. She turned out to be Bruce Lee, and she came expensive. Budgetary constraints apart, Manuel was compelled to accept that the theatre could not be deharmonized through the inclusion of posters. One had to accept the total integration of its structure, and this included not just the stage and stone walls but the stars and the moon that shone in the courtyard while Chandra danced on stage. It was not possible to deface these natural elements; they were stronger than any stage machinery.

134 TRANSITION

DANCE When I first saw a run-through of Request Concert in these idyllic surroundings, I expected the play to be jarring. On the contrary, it was disconcertingly clear, the tensions in Kroetz’s text sharply heightened by the environment. All the complications that I had imagined with the colliding levels of narrative were absent, because the only level represented in the run-through was dance. Chandra performed on stage with no rhythmic accompaniment, no electronic soundtrack, no television or radio broadcast. Barring the chirping of a few birds, there was only a pure, concentrated silence in which Chandra moved through the motions of her dance. More than in the theatre, this silence was arresting because it highlighted the emptiness of the woman’s world depicted on stage. There were no props, and so no possibility of hearing incidental sounds (teaspoons tinkling in cups, oil sizzling in cooking pots, eating sounds). In contrast to this taut silence, the only sounds that jarred meaningfully occurred when Chandra would exit from the stage and walk into the audience area, where she would wash real dishes and utensils with detergent and water in a makeshift kitchen area. These were the only props used throughout the performance and their commonplace reality unavoidably enhanced the absence of props on stage. When Chandra entered the ‘kitchen area’, a movement repeated three times during the performance, she would enter the world of ‘real time’; when she shut the stage door behind her, she would revert to ‘dance time’. Even within the dance, which was entirely measured, almost monotonous, there were sections when Chandra would stop dancing and consciously lapse into real postures and gestures. For instance, she would watch TV with the total concentration of a Bharat Natyam performer, frozen in a classical posture, and drink tea with the appropriate hastas (hand gestures). Then she would place the tea beside her and relax, placing her arms behind her back, and stretching her neck slightly. At this point, the ‘dance’ would stop and ‘real life’ would enter the performance imperceptibly. It is to Chandra’s credit that she was able to resonate these infinitesimal distinctions between varying states of being. Her dance itself was so unembellished that it felt ‘close to life’. Yet, she was able to make us recognize it as dance when she altered the energies of her body in such a way that she was simply being, not dancing on stage. GESTURES Even in the first rehearsals, I was struck by the clarity of the gestures. Chandra exploited her intimate knowledge of hastas to perform the minutiae of her actions. After using real door and windows in the Calcutta and Bombay productions, which seemed much more resonant than canvas doors and flats, it was

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 135

even more significant to see Chandra creating her environment with her hands. The opening of the window was thus suggested through the placing of the palms of the hands against each other. When her hands spread in a horizontal motion, the space around Chandra would seem to dilate. Even the opening of a crack in the window after shutting it had so much more resonance in a dance than in the theatre. Likewise, the use of fingers to suggest different states of mind during the stitching sequence was vivid in its precision. Not burdened by the actual act of threading a needle, Chandra could focus all her energies on the oppression and grace contained in stitching. In the cooking sequence as well, I felt that the very absence of pots, pans and masalas became a contributing factor to the dynamics of action. Chandra was able to convey a wider range of gestures and textures relating to cooking than Usha or Sulabha, because they had to deal with the practical matters of lighting the stove, heating the water, chopping the onions and simultaneously conveying their inner energies through these actions. In the theatre (as in life) the actress has to wait three to five minutes for the water to boil before she can place the rice in it. In dance, however, she can “boil” the water at her own rhythm within her own sequence of movements. She can edit whatever incidental gestures that are not germane to the action of boiling. If necessary, she can heat the rice without boiling the water at all. Ultimately, what matters in dance is not the presentation of objects, but the savouring of emotions underlying these objects. It is the human response to the object that is danced, not the object itself. If Chandra had simply used Bharat Natyam to designate the objective reality of her character, she would have achieved very little, despite the contemporary setting of the scenario. What does it really matter after all if a hasta has to be modified in order to suggest the checking of a gas cylinder or the winding of an alarm clock? These actions are merely contemporary additions to an endless repertoire of ‘mechanical’ gestures. But where Bharat Natyam truly revealed its inner resources and rejuvenative powers was in its responsiveness to contemporary states of mind like alienation. Now at one level this condition might seem to be altogether alien to the classical Indian dance-theatre, but Chandra was able to explore its nuances through minute details. Most significantly, she revealed how she was detached from the very act of eating itself. Her fingers moved in eating gestures (tearing, scooping, smearing), but the posture of her body was angled in such a way that her lips scarcely seemed to touch the food. She went through the motions of her meal without enjoyment, without participation, her face a study in blankness, abnormally vacant. It is a testimony to the infinite richness of Bharat Natyam that it could suggest the intensity of this alienation along with more extroverted emotions visible in the brushing of hair, the removal of the sari or the eating of paan. The more I watched Chandra perform the same gestures, the more closely I became aware of the organic links between the gestures and the alignment of the

136 TRANSITION

body. It was not enough for the hands to be positioned in a particular way to mean something—they had to be fully supported by the coordination of the other limbs in the body, and most crucially, by the energy emanating from the spinal column. For much of the performance, Chandralekha’s back was held erect, her walk metronomically precise, broken only by sudden bursts of energy. The nrtta (pure dance) in her performance was embodied in this walk, which had close to three variations, very slightly modified to suggest gradations of emotion and energy. The ‘returning home’ walk was more restrained than the ‘preparations for stitching’ walk, where the hands moved more fluidly with the sway of the body. At no point did the walk become merely elaborate, calling attention to its form: it was a unit that held the piece together rigorously by its absence of nuances. Even Chandra’s abhinaya (dance with mime) dismissed subtleties for their own sake. Her eyes stared rather than darted from side to side, registering emotions with strong simplicity. Head movements were delicately fractured into minute jerks. Hands and arms were disciplined to support the most economical gestures. Only the fingers seemed to have a certain license in shading the colours of the performance. Overall, there was a quality of dryness in Chandra’s dance. It almost appeared as if she had strained the juices underlying the Bharat Natyam forms, yet preserved their essence. If her gestures had been overly nuanced, they would not have been able to suggest the mechanization of the woman, but, on the contrary, would have called attention to their own expressive powers. All too often the abhinaya sections in Bharat Natyam performances can become indulgent, when the dancer expresses emotions that are not necessarily contained in the forms. In contrast, Chandra never emotes on stage; she always speaks through her gestures. What I particularly admired is how she incorporated the Bharat Natyam talas within the precision of her movements. As for the TV news and Tamil songs on the radio, they seemed to stimulate her inner rhythms. Her dance was even more fiercely composed for the intrusion of these mechanical sounds. THE CLASH OF SOUNDS When the sounds of the media were superimposed on the talas in the early rehearsals, the collision was undeniably perverse. Lakshminarayan, the genial, perceptive accompanist, who had bravely supported our experiment ‘for Chandra’s sake’, began to have his doubts about the clash of sounds. ‘What’, he asked, ‘if the audience thinks that I cannot beat proper time to the film music?’ Manuel responded: ‘I don’t want you to harmonize with the music. You beat your own rhythms, pure and strong, while the film songs continue in the background.’ It took some persuasion and experimentation with levels of sound to convince Lakshminarayan that the realities of classical music and film could cohere disharmoniously. We made sure that the sound levels of the radio and TV

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 137

programmes were just loud enough subtly to undercut the classical rhythms. Eventually, it became resoundingly clear that the talas could cut through the repetitive and inane rhythms of the commercial songs. Yet, their counterpointing provided a context in which the audience could think of India’s past in terms of its contemporary reality. Tradition could survive the onslaught of the media. More than in the Calcutta and Bombay productions, the content of the radio programme clashed significantly with the silent action of the performance. In the more or less ‘realistic’ environments of the two early productions, the banal messages on the radio had blended with the actions of the woman. But in the rarefied atmosphere of the Madras production, the advertisement jingles resonated more meaningfully. They were sharp reminders of the crass commercialism that exists in India today, where almost any commodity (soap powder, Britannia Milk Bikis, cooking oil) can be mythologized with seductive ease. Instead of making the audience laugh (as I had imagined), these jingles clarified the absurd power of the media through their wording and rhetorical delivery, punctuated by atmospheric backdrops and electronic sounds. In contrast, the representation of emotions through the medium of Bharat Natyam, stylized and abstract as it was, seemed reassuringly intelligible. THE BODY Against the power of the media, we offered the energies of the body. More than any other dancer in India today, Chandra has philosophized about the body in the social context. In her dance-drama Angika, a lehrstücke of Indian dance that relates the origins and forms of different physical traditions (Bharat Natyam, Yoga, martial arts), she demonstrates how the body has been ‘subverted of its essential energy content’ through three stages of social development: first, through its deification of gods, religions and priests; then in its cooptation by kings, courtiers and men; and finally, in its subjugation by a ‘moralistic society’ where a dancer has been degraded to the level of a prostitute, an ornamental object. Though Angika ends in a ‘celebration of the body for self-renewal’, it leaves the audience thinking about the varied manipulations of the body by society and its inner capacities for resistance and growth. The body, Chandra believes, is our only defence against negative forces in our society. Only if we are in touch with our inner energies can we control our positions in this world. These energies are gained not merely through musclecontrol and gymnastic virtuosity, but an intensely concentrated awareness of the body’s organisms, their interrelationships and control by breathing. Chandra enjoys narrating a story of a young martial arts performer, whose guru literally ‘thrashed’ him with blows and kicks in a demonstration of sorts. The student was completely untouched, because he had learned to direct his breath to various parts of his body in order to withstand the blows. While Chandra does not advocate this use of the body as a literal means of self-defence,

138 TRANSITION

she does see it as an energizing force that is capable of protecting our inner affirmations and truths. With her holistic reverence for the body, it is not surprising that Chandra radiates boldness both on stage and in everyday life. She is not the kind of woman to give in to external pressures. More precisely, she is not Fraulein Rasch —a prototype of an ordinary, working-class woman who ends her mechanized life by committing suicide. The very thought of suicide seems antithetical to Chandra’s being. After seeing her perform it a number of times, I eventually had the guts to ask her: ‘Are you committing suicide?’ ‘No’, she said, somewhat surprised at the question, ‘All I want to do is to free myself from the wall.’ THE SUICIDE To situate this enigmatic statement in a theatrical context, I offer a description of how Chandra interpreted the suicide in her performance. When she lay down on the floor to go to bed, she broke out of the Bharat Natyam choreographic framework. The final section of the dance was entirely her own. And it must have been shocking for the traditionalists in the audience to see Chandra’s feet staring them in the face. Completely still, Chandra would relax her feet till they spread out in the shape of a fan. Then she slowly bent one of her legs from the knee into the fold of her sari, creating a strangely disembodied shape. Gradually, she began a slow, tortuous movement, rolling on her front, then her back, with her hands flailing outwards. The energy of the roll was rigorously controlled, so that the body seemed to be rotating in sharp, abrupt movements, almost like a slow-motion camera shot of a corpse writhing on the ground. These rotational movements eventually consolidated in a sculpturesque shape, where Chandra’s face and body were pressed against the ground, while one of her legs moved upwards to form the apex of an abstract, triangular block. For me, this shape suggested a deadlock, an impasse where the emotions could go no further, and only a denouement was left to be unravelled. Finally, Chandra’s body would relax somewhat, and she would roll all the way to the back of the stage wall. This expanse of stone, glinting under the white glare of projector lights, looked like an unpainted canvas. Against this background, Chandra would gradually rise, her back to the audience, and press herself against the wall. She would stand on her toes and raise her hands vertically, so that she resembled a sheath in black, her white hair shining. In this very concentrated moment of silence, when Chandra almost appeared to be suspended, it seemed to many in the audience that the woman had hanged herself. Then very gradually, she turned and faced the audience for the first time after lying on the floor. That face never failed to shock me, because it appeared to be so terrifyingly calm. Chandra’s eyes would never waver at this point.

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 139

Then, removing her back from the wall, she would step forward and very unobtrusively begin to raise her hands, palms upwards. In this slight movement, it seemed as if Chandra were moving, even though she was standing still. And on this note of movement, of ‘freeing herself from the wall’ as Chandra describes it, the play ended. When I first saw the suicide, it seemed inconsistent with the rest of the miseen-scène. Till she went to bed, Chandra performed nearly all Kroetz’s actions as designated in the text—coming home, opening the window, undressing, watching TV, cooking, switching on the radio, eating, stitching, switching off the radio, shutting the window, preparing for bed. Then she rolled on the ground, pressed herself against a wall, and freed herself from it. The final section of the performance seemed to exist in its own time/space, contradicting the relatively consistent use of Bharat Natyam to interpret the German text. I asked Manuel why he had omitted the details of the text after the woman gets up from bed. ‘If she cooks and stitches’, I asked, ‘then why can’t she swallow tablets and drink wine (or its equivalent)?’ Only after seeing the suicide danced rehearsal after rehearsal—and it became increasingly beguiling to me (beguiling in what it was expressing through abstraction) —did I realize that Chandra was being true to Kroetz, but on a philosophical rather than a dramaturgical level. Ultimately, our clarifications for the suicide came from a deeply thoughtprovoking statement by Kroetz that serves as a preface to the play. In this statement, I was initially stung by his seeming contempt for the ‘unfulfilled expectations, endless hopes and petty dreams’ of those people who cannot free themselves from the ‘slavery of production’. Kroetz equates their ‘living and vegetating’ to those of ‘beasts of burden’. But the twist in his statement occurs when he poses a hypothesis: ‘If the explosive energy of this massive exploitation and oppression were not so sadly turned against the oppressed and exploited, we would have a revolutionary situation’ In other words, if the people who commit suicide could only direct their energy and courage not against themselves, but against the society that is perpetuated through their death, then the world could change. Or, if not change, then at least it could be disturbed in its complacencies and dominant mechanisms. Kroetz’s statement made immediate sense to Chandra. ‘That’s what I’m dancing’, she said, ‘not the suicide itself.’ Only after the production was over did it become clear to me that Chandra dealt with the suicide by negating it. What mattered to her was the projection of energy that she as a dancer embodied, and which she attempted to convey even through the mechanization of her character. It didn’t really matter to her whether the audience believed that she had hanged herself. What concerned her was the representation of a process wherein a woman was completely immobilized by the pressures of her existence, then freed from the wall (her eternal prison) through an inner energy and volition that suggested a new growth, a renewal of spirit.

140 TRANSITION

Whether or not the audience understood this specific interpretation I cannot say. What should be emphasized, however, is that the suicide registered deeply during the performance. It was the most concentrated section in the play, the audience’s energies feeding the still moments on stage in a rare communion. Silence and rhythm, stillness and movement, death and life: all these elements cohered magically. The full moon certainly helped to cast a spell on the performance. So did the waves of the sea which were subtly amplified through the speakers. THE SPOKEN WORD As we approached opening night, Manuel’s doubts about aestheticism resurfaced. With no Tamil film posters on the walls of the theatre, he also had to reconcile himself to an absence of words. Kroetz’s text was translated into Tamil, but we did not have sufficient time to use this text as a spoken narrative. Our initial plan had been to interrupt the dance structure with words, but this was harder than we imagined, because words have their own weight and rhythm. If they had to interrupt the talas vocalized on stage, they would have to be rhythmically integrated into the overall performance. A special score of words needed to be created before the musical structure of the performance could be interrupted meaningfully. Apart from the shortage of time that prevented us from creating such a score, Chandra felt that we had sufficient interruptions and levels within the performance structure that were demanding in themselves—not only for the performer to concentrate on but for the audience to absorb. Our production was not just a monochromatic presentation of Request Concert in Bharat Natyam style. Within the dance, there were switches between real time/ dance time, real-life movement/dance movement. Then there was the rhythmic accompaniment of the talas that coexisted with the TV and radio broadcasts, all of which could be silenced or sounded simultaneously. And finally there was the superimposition of an electronic soundtrack of oppressive city and household sounds on the entire performance structure. To insert the Tamil narrative (of the German text) within the multilevelled structure of the performance would have, in my view, bewildered the audience. I argued with Manuel that the narrative would not enlighten the audience in any way, but merely contribute to the formal intricacy of the entire production. I wish in a way that I had not raised the criticism, because Manuel promptly insisted that I read out Kroetz’s preface to the play before Chandra made her entrance. He felt that this critical perspective on the role of suicide in an oppressive society would help the audience to view the performance with some social consciousness. Without the commentary to guide them, the production could easily become an esoteric experiment, a play of forms. ‘Why can’t the audience read Kroetz’s notes in the programme?’ I asked. ‘Because you know only too well that they won’t read it’. Manuel responded. ‘I want the spoken word to be

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 141

heard in the performance.’ When he threatened to read the note in German, I agreed to read the statement rather like an announcer on a slow news bulletin on the radio: ‘This play…is an attempt…to depict…facts…often found …in police reports. Suicide…in most cases…is carried out…with incredible orderliness.’ As I read these lines on opening night, facing the audience from the front row where I was part of the spectators, it began to rain. We had to stop the play and seek refuge in Chandra’s courtyard. Less than an hour later, the clouds obligingly cleared and we started again. The electronic city sounds rose to a deafening crescendo, then snapped to a deathly silence in which I read out the news broadcast of Kroetz’s text. Then I continued to read the first lines of the play—‘On a normal workday, a woman comes home from work…’—while Chandra made her appearance through the audience. She unlocked the stage door with a real key and entered the stage, a perfectly normal woman. Then the rhythm started and she began to dance. PARTING THOUGHTS As a spectator, I found the performance riveting. Chandra held my attention with her presence and the sheer consciousness of her gestures. Lakshminarayan, too, was in great form, surprising Chandra with a variety of improved talas and insistent rhythms. Their combination was so sound that Manuel and I had no need to fear the wrath of irate traditionalists. Whether they liked it or not, our experiment made sense. One criticism came from a journalist who pointed out that our production had been advertised as a work-in-progress. ‘When will the final product be seen?’ he wanted to know. As far as I was concerned, what we had achieved was a clear representation of our intercultural needs and inquiries. Manuel, however, felt that the production could have sustained sharper interruptions and a more abrasive countering of Indian aesthetics through the spoken work and environmental devices. I felt that all intercultural experiments had to work within certain limits: ultimately, one had to respect the values and taboos of the territory on which the experiment has been shaped. When we left Madras, we both felt that we had learned something about the possibilities of theatre. Chandra, too, had discovered how Bharat Natyam could be stretched into even more elusive dimensions that she had imagined. Dance in theatre, theatre in dance. We all felt that these arts needed each other once more for mutual sustenance and creative growth. Our Request Concert production in Madras had combined dance and theatre within a contemporary framework of thought. At one level, this made it an experimental production, but it was also ‘traditional’ insofar as it adhered to one of the central assumptions of the Natyasastra, where Natya (drama) includes dance. So embracing is its form that it would be difficult to say what it does not include, Bharat Muni informs us that ‘there is no wise maxim, no learning, no art or craft, no device, no action that is not found in drama’.

142 TRANSITION

Perhaps those of us in the theatre who want to break barriers, cross cultures and incorporate seemingly alien elements into our work should be inspired by these words. They should encourage us to see the future of theatre in a dynamic relation to the past. Our lives can be illuminated through traditional forms, not through veneration or reconstruction, but through a reliving of these forms in a contemporary context. REVIVAL Almost two years later, I had an opportunity to relive the process of Request Concert with Chandra, when she had been invited to participate along with her entire troupe in a prestigious dance festival organized by the Norddeutsche Konzertdirektion in West Germany. This was an opportunity for us to test how our Indian adaptation of a German text would be received by a German audience in Germany itself. How ‘familiar’ would Kroetz be to this audience within the ‘unfamiliar’ context of the Bharat Natyam framework? And how would our own perception of the experiment be affected by a German response to our culture? One of the challenges in such intercultural ventures concerns the transportation of an aesthetic experience from one cultural environment to another. From the open space of Chandra’s mandala-charged theatre, we would have to transport the play to the most sophisticated proscenium theatres in the Ruhr district of West Germany. From Elliots Beach in Madras, we would have to perform in cities like Dusseldorf and Cologne, and smaller towns like Remscheid and Leverkusen. How would we cope with these changes in environment and all the values (social, economic and political) embodied within them? Would the new spaces subvert our work, or would we be able to adapt it meaningfully within their constraints and possibilities? I cannot deny that we were relieved to know that Manuel had worked in some of these theatres while he had lived in Germany. We felt that he would be able to handle all the technical problems. But two weeks into the rehearsal process, when he hadn’t yet shown up, we got a long-distance call from Tokyo in which he expressed doubts and reservations about his participation. He was willing to come to Madras for the remainder of the rehearsal period, but not to accompany the production to Germany. Instinctively, Chandra and I knew that underlying all the practical problems that he raised, he simply did not want to return to his own country. I, in particular, knew how relentlessly Manuel had travelled in the last two years, from one Asian country to the next, completing two more productions of Request Concert in Jakarta and Tokyo, and postponing the Korean production twice. In his exploration of other cultures, or perhaps, of his own self through the mediation of other cultures, he had drifted further away from his home and career in New York. While his interculturalism had resulted in an even greater hunger for travel, my own encounter with other cultures in Jakarta, Seoul and Tokyo had simply brought me back to my own home.

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 143

At first, we were dismayed that Manuel was not going to join us. But it was not long before we realized the truth of his own reassurance that we didn’t really need him. He had functioned in the first production primarily as a catalyst, a ‘foreign element’ that had triggered off a creative process within the Indian cultural context. Now the work needed to be refined within the details of a specifically Indian sensibility. The overall structure of the production was clear, but the details needed to be blended. As our ever-reassuring guide Lakshminarayan commented: ‘Sab thik hai, lekin abhi kaam aur jamana hoga’ The performance had to be more subtly ‘cooked’ before it could be savoured. NUANCES Stepping in for Manuel, Dasharath Patel, one of India’s leading designers and architects, helped considerably in reenvisioning the play on a proscenium stage. Through his angle of vision, we saw the necessity of building an eight-foot wall at the back of the stage with a wooden panel in front, slightly off-centre, to create a tension in the foreground. The brass and copper utensils remained in front of the stage, but without any water contained in them. We found that the ‘reality’ of Chandra’s washing gestures could be heightened through the elimination of water. As she mimed these ‘realistic’ gestures, the tala would stop, and all we would hear was the clinking and rattling of her bangles as she moved her hands vigorously. Occasionally, the utensils would vibrate as they touched one another. One moment of surprise occurred when Chandra interrupted her stitching by walking across to the kitchen area, where she would pour water into a brass mug. For this minute detail, we realized that the insertion of real water would come as a surprise to the audience. The moment was all the more magical because Chandra drank the water ‘naturally’ by pouring it into her mouth, with her head tilted backwards, her right foot slightly arched on the ground. In this still position, it was impossible to say whether Chandra was a dancer or just an ordinary Indian woman drinking water. Abstraction and reality, natyadharmi and lokadharmi, had coalesced in that moment. The only other real prop on stage was a sari that Chandra stretched from one end of the stage to the centre, where she would wave it slightly in an imaginary breeze. If this detail seems exotic, it should be emphasized that for all the colour and texture of the sari, Chandra stretched and folded it with the same steady walk that she maintained for most of the play. Her composed, almost dry demeanour counterpointed the few sensuous elements in her environment. During one rehearsal, it was a treat to watch Lakshminarayan demonstrate how Chandra could stretch the sari without actually using one. Through pliant gestures and a most sensual undulation of his shoulders, he was able to capture more femininity than Chandra had registered on stage. We all had to applaud the sheer grace of his demonstration. But as Chandra realized, it would be inappropriate for her to surrender to such sensuality. Ultimately, she had to

144 TRANSITION

represent a woman whose energies had been mechanized by the world around her. It was this restraint in Chandra’s interpretation of the woman that made me respect her increasingly as a performer. Not once did she succumb to the purely virtuosic or decorative elements in her dance. Always, her impulse was to minimize (and thereby, concentrate) the inner energy of her movement. At times, she was ready to erase a total sequence of movements in order to register stillness. For instance, during one rehearsal, she struck a most riveting Bharat Natyam stance, while listening to the radio programme. She could have been a gopi listening to Krishna’s flute. But in the very next rehearsal, she totally dissolved this posture into a mannequin-like repose, enhanced through the slightest sway of her shoulders. Then, she would walk back to where she had left her imaginary thali of food, but with such minute steps that one almost felt that she was not walking. Only when she started to eat her food with defined hastas did one realize that she had already completed her walk. Both Chandra and I are deeply drawn to the principles of erasure in dance, which are more evident in Japanese theatrical traditions like Noh than in our own performance traditions, which are perhaps the most expressive in the world. While a Koodiyattam performer is capable of elaborating on a single emotion with a multitude of sensations and variations, a Noh performer is almost invisible in his registering of emotions. Sometimes one does not see his movement until he has completed it. It is this ‘invisible movement’ that we attempted to explore within our minimalist use of Bharat Natyam. To enhance its delicacy, we paid particular attention to the tonality of the entire production. In fact, this was so important to us that we had to omit a very powerful, English-news bulletin on television covering Operation Black Thunder at the Golden Temple in Punjab. Even if we had wanted to design a programme that could have illuminated the propaganda of the Central Government, we could not have done a better job than Doordarshan. Moreover, the juxtaposition of terrorism with Rajiv Gandhi speaking to farmers about ‘grassroots’ activity (in a subsequent news item) was almost lethal in its irony. What seemed like a perfectly ‘innocent’ news broadcast acquired a subversive power when we situated it within our representation. The subversion was particularly strong when Chandra would calmly switch off the television just after Gandhi would begin his ‘grassroots’ spiel with the familiar words, ‘Bhaio Baheno’. The silencing of his voice was explosive. However, after hearing the broadcast a number of times, we had to admit that it was calling too much attention to itself. More specifically, the sounds of the English language did not belong to the world on stage. So, we returned to the Tamil news bulletin, where the anonymous voice of the announcer provided the appropriate tone. Likewise, we retained the Tamil film music on the radio programme, establishing one convention for the entire soundtrack of the production. When the tala sounded on stage (primarily during Chandra’s walks),

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 145

the recorded music would be heard only in the auditorium. When the tala stopped, then the music would filter back onto the stage. This manipulation of the music from ‘inner’ to ‘outer’ space required acute timing to the dynamics of the performance, which our sound technician, Mathias, gradually acquired over a period of time. Our lighting also required the most delicate modulations as the woman drifted from one pool of light to another, while eating, stitching, doing puja, and washing the dishes. Of course, Sadanand, our lightman, was actually the all-seeing eye of the entire rehearsal process. He knew every nuance in Chandra’s performance even as it lived and changed from night to night. RETHINKING SUICIDE The immediacy that Chandra brings to every performance is one of her gifts as an artist. If she does not feel a performance, she will simply not go through with its ‘mechanics’ (one of the dirtiest words in her vocabulary). In this regard, she received considerable support from one of our most dynamic contributors to the overall energy of the production, Padmanabhan Das, an edakka player from Kerala. Both Chandra and I felt that the representation of the suicide could be heightened through the resonances of a drum, which could evoke the life-pulse of the woman. The mridangam did not have the right tone for our purpose. Using it would have been purely decorative. However, in the delicate range of resonances provided by the edakka, we felt a core of energy that was, at once, elusive and yet startlingly true to the inner being of the woman. Impulsively, Chandra suggested that Kroetz’s note on suicide (which had opened the production) should be counterpointed with short bursts of the edakka. When we eventually tried this out (in Germany, Kroetz’s note was read in German), it almost seemed as if two cultures were colliding with each other, the edakka resisting the negation of life implied in Kroetz’s statement. Finally, during the suicide at the end of the production, this edakka sounded once again, evoking the energy that sustains the woman through all her pain and torture. As she freed herself from the wall, the edakka would rise to a crescendo, energizing the woman’s decision to live and begin a new cycle of existence. At long last, our production began to acquire a rhythmic unity that it had previously lacked. By fusing the beginning and the end of the woman’s life, the edakka embodied a timeless principle that continues regardless of the petty traumas that constitute our lives, the ‘unfulfilled expectations’ and ‘small dreams’ that Kroetz mentions in his preface. During the revival of the production at the Museum Academy in Madras, the suicide was so agonizing to watch (particularly for some women) that the ‘freedom’ of the wall failed to register. ‘We died with you’, is what Chandra was told after the performance by some feminist friends. On the one hand, it was stirring to hear these women acknowledge their participation in Chandra’s

146 TRANSITION

performance, but it was also significant to note how they did not feel the need for a more ‘militant’ representation of the woman’s condition. In a discussion following the performance, it became clear that what makes Chandralekha exemplary among feminist performers in India today is that she totally internalizes the oppression of women before subverting it through her own energy and consciousness. For her, art and politics cannot be separated. She cannot justify an agit-prop representation of any problem, however critical, if the enactment is not totally experienced. Sincerity, for her, is not enough. A woman who wants to represent another woman’s suffering has to take on that suffering. She cannot simply depict it from her neck upwards, like a television performer. Her commitment has to be physicalized through a creative process; it cannot be assumed through the upholding of an ideology. While Chandra’s representation of the suicide was undeniably intense, we did worry about the fact that her ‘freedom’ from the wall had failed to register in the final moments of the Madras production. Ultimately, we wanted to say that the woman finds the energy within herself to live. In fact,Chandra had clarified her own position on the subject in her book One More News, which contains a passionate affirmation of life in the context of women’s suicides in India. If women become aware that their dying will not change other women’s destinies but, on the other hand, will reinforce their oppression, will they not opt, instead of death, for life, however difficult, rough, harsh, cruel. Would they not give their energy to change rather than to the maintenance of oppression, of status quo? Would they not give their energy to their sisters, rather than to their oppressors? On reading these lines, I felt that they should be included in our production either in juxtaposition to Kroetz’s statement on suicide, or else in place of it. But gradually, we realized that all statements that Chandra had to make on stage would have to be concretized through her own presence. Eventually, we accepted that the ‘freedom’ from the wall would be asserted if Chandra punctuated it somewhat differently. Also, it was necessary for the lights to silhouette the hands moving upwards in a gesture of liberation. As always in the theatre, we realized that the minutest details are intrinsically related to the totality of the performance, both its body and spirit, its innermost being and message to the world. IN GERMANY For us, the process of rethinking and reliving the play in Madras was rewarding in itself. Increasingly the trip to Germany became incidental to our learning process. In fact, when I look back on our ten day tour of eight productions in six German cities, four productions of Request Concert and four of Angika, all I remember is one relentless spate of activity that was a telling comment on the

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 147

mechanization depicted in Kroetz’s play. We had no choice but to submit to the ‘machinery’ of an international dance festival, which left us with little or no time to reflect on our own experience. From our hotel in Dortmund, we would be driven every morning to a new theatre, which we would reach by 10.30 a.m. By 1 p.m., we had surveyed the stage, inspected the ‘wall’, marked our locations on the stage. Then Sadanand would set up lights just in time for us to have a run-through by 4 p.m. Three hours later, Chandra would be performing the piece on stage in front of the audience. Shortly after, we would eat a meal and be driven back to the hotel, where we would snatch a few hours of sleep before repeating the same routine the next day. I need hardly add that this kind of ‘time pressure’ does not lend itself to intercultural exchange. All our energies were spent in ‘getting the show on’ in ten hours. We had no time to question our new environment, which we experienced only in fragments through meals at restaurants (where the dominant vegetarianism of the group posed many problems), long interminable hours on the autobahn (despite travelling at 110 km per hour), exchanges with theatre technicians (who operated like members of a factory) and cursory encounters with bureaucrats, guides, journalists and cameramen. This kind if interculturalism has less to do with creativity than with endurance and stamina. Despite these numbing conditions of work, at least two productions of Request Concert resonated powerfully in the intimate theatre spaces of the Kleines Haus in Dusseldorf and the Comedia Colonia in Cologne. In contrast, the Forum theatre in Leverkusen was an absolute nightmare. It was like performing on a football field placed in a galactic space station. Chandra took one look at the gleaming white seats (about 900 of them) and remarked with her characteristic intuition: ‘They look like capsules.’ She was right: this arrogant space had been funded by Bayer, one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world, famous for its aspirin. I admired Chandra for daring to perform a one-woman, minimalist dance-theatre piece in this clinical vacuum, which was the absolute antithesis of what we needed for our play. Unavoidably, she had no choice but to ‘fight’ the space with all the energy she could muster. A mere speck on stage, she nonetheless held on to her concentration and dignity as a performer, without playing to the audience. Despite the subversion of our energy through these alien spaces, what moved me about the entire experiment was how the difficulties brought us all closer together. The bond of trust between Chandra and Lakshminarayan, who have both learned from the same guru, was particularly inspiring. Though Chandra does not practise any religion, she nonetheless believes in the power of mantras. Always, before every performance, it was my duty as the director to lead her from her dressing room to the darkened backstage, where Lakshminarayan would bless the imminent performance with a few words of prayer. There was so much faith in his utterance, one could only be strengthened through it. All I had to tell Chandra before slipping away were my ‘famous last words’: ‘Remember the

148 TRANSITION

spine.’ Moments later, she would be on stage with her spine upright, maintaining the slowest (and perhaps, most deceptive) walk that any Bharat Natyam dancer has sustained through a one-hour performance. RELATIONSHIPS For me, the significance of our trip to Germany had less to do with learning about theatre than with observing the social and personal relationships that are generated through intercultural encounters. Unquestionably, our closest friends were artists, notably Suzanne Linke and Pina Bausch, whose respect and love for Chandra were very genuine. The appreciation of these women was memorable not only because they happen to be among the most noted figures in the contemporary dance-theatre of West Germany (and for that matter, the EuroAmerican dance-theatre scene), but because of the grace with which they expressed their feelings for Chandra, often slightly or just by holding her hand. These women and Chandra were so different in their cultural bearings, and yet so united in their sensibility and courage. In their meeting, one saw the possibilities of a ‘world culture’ where individuals can transcend their national and cultural differences to meet on a different level of creative exchange. Chandra, I believe, is an important artist as much for her art as for her relationships. For her, it is the continuum of life and art that matters. If she inspires dancers and, indeed, all her collaborators to fully live what they are doing, it is because of her own energy on stage and in everyday life. Singular as her consciousness may be, it is not entrapped within the confines of an ivory tower. Her aesthetic sense is very concrete. In this regard, she is not scared to intervene in areas which most artists would avoid. This could involve open confrontations with the government or the police (whose imposition of ‘house arrest’ she has fought in the past). But it could also involve something as seemingly innocuous as an encounter with a stranger. Just after the revival of Request Concert in Madras, when we had returned to Besant Nagar in a very elated state of mind, we heard the cries of a drunken fisherwoman just outside Chandra’s house. She was shrieking in pain with strident cries. A man was hitting her in his attempt to calm her down. Chandra simply walked up to the woman, whispered a few words to her, and comforted her. She did this as if she had known the woman all her life. I believe that it is these direct interventions in life, small as they may seem, from which Chandra derives her strength as an artist. When she speaks of the ‘art’ to be found in the collum made outside of a slum-dweller’s house, where every morning the women create a fresh design on the mud floor to enliven their environment, she is not, to my mind, sentimentalizing the innate aesthetic sense of our ‘oppressed’ people. Chandra sees art in the most everyday phenomena of life, and not just in collums but in the flowers decorating women’s hair, in the tribhangi of our everyday postures of waiting and repose, in the shape of a vessel or the fall of a sari.

REQUEST CONCERT IN MADRAS 149

Truly, one can say of Chandra that, for her, our tradition is not just a repository of forms and concepts to which we have to ‘return’ in order to find our ‘roots’. Tradition lives in our everyday lives in India, despite the commodification, corruption and systematic destruction of the environment. All we need is to absorb its energies, so that we can derive some strength to resist the negative forces in our world. Perhaps most of all for Chandra, it is in our bodies that the energies of our tradition are most meaningfully incarnated. In the sun, moon, and stars that reside invisibly (and unconsciously) in our beings, there are lessons to be learned not only about the cosmic origins of art but of their ceaseless transformations into life.

150

Chapter 9 Retrospect

Almost three years have passed since the first production of Request Concert was staged in Calcutta. It is now time to look back and reflect on the achievements and limits of our intercultural work. In this retrospect, I will focus for the most part on the productions in India, but I will refer to the Jakarta production in which I participated, and in less detail, to the productions in Seoul and Tokyo, where I assisted Manuel on the preliminary explorations of the productions. It will become evident from this retrospect why I needed to return to India, where my search for theatre continues within the intracultural contradictions and possibilities of my own history. CONTEXTS OF CULTURES It is significant that I needed to begin this project in my home city of Calcutta to which I had returned frequently in the seven years previously, while living as an expatriate in the US. I cannot deny that the productions in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras helped considerably in concretizing my affinities to those details of everyday life in India that I had previously taken for granted. How many of us, I wonder, see our own homes, the streets where we live, our daily rituals and gestures? Request Concert taught me not to take the familiar for granted, but rather, to absorb its cluster of auras, which in turn contain layers of history. In this regard, the very ‘foreignness’ of the German text illuminated what is normally taken for granted in India. Just a simple action like opening the window or smoking a cigarette necessitated an alteration of Kroetz’s choices through substitutions, deletions and elaborations in the individual performance texts of the productions. Then, after having made these ‘indigenous’ choices, we had to submit them to the scrutiny of local audiences. And sometimes, we were soundly criticized. For instance, if the Bengali woman could not smoke a cigarette after her meal, what could she do? Eat an orange, perhaps? ‘No, never, we don’t eat oranges after dinner.’ ‘Why?’ ‘How can you ask such a question? We just don’t eat oranges after dinner. Understand?’ I understood. We had our own taboos and rules that my intercultural work helped me to identify more clearly. What made our adaptations of Kroetz different from the numerous adaptations of Ibsen, Pirandello and Brecht in the

152 RETROSPECT

contemporary Indian theatre, was precisely this consciousness of the difference that exists between cultural contexts. Our work would have been facile and essentially irresponsible if we had failed to address the German social context with as much intensity as its Indian counterpart. In this context, I learned much from Manuel’s reading of his own culture through his meticulous analysis of Kroetz’s text. He emphasized the weight of Fraulein Rasch’s gestures. And yet, it was only when I was in Germany myself, while travelling with the Madras production of Request Concert, that I realized the ethos of quintessential German actions like window-cleaning. Wherever I went in the small towns of the Ruhr district, in Wuppertal, Essen, Dortmund and Remscheid, I saw middle-aged German women, faintly blurred behind lace curtains, cleaning windows with an almost neurotic precision and attention to detail. The total absorption of these women in their action was something I needed to see before I realized the impossibility of its transference in an Indian context. And yet, we did manage to re-envision the context of most of Fraulein Rasch’s gestures. In this regard, the intense participation of our Indian actresses in the process of adaptation heightened the intercultural inquiry. As co-directors of the productions, they greatly assisted in subverting the normal actor-director relationship, where it is the director (invariably male) who plays the dominant role in shaping the performance text. I believe that it is imperative to give actors from ‘other’ cultures the freedom to shape their own performance texts. This freedom, one could argue, should be made available to all actors, but in intercultural work, the need is more immediate. One has no right to impose one’s cultural choices on people who have a different view of the world. Indeed, it is nothing less than an impertinence to tell an Indian woman, who lives in a society of bride-burnings and the resurgence of sati, to take her life on stage if her entire consciousness revolts against the thought. She has to be given the freedom to question, justify, postpone, or negate the suicide. She has to be freed from the tyranny of directors who get actors to move with rhythms that counter their cultural bios, or to speak in languages that are not their own. Our play might have been silent, but this did not, to my mind, prevent the women from expressing statements relating to their inner worlds and positions in society. LOCAL ENVIRONMENTS I need hardly add that another factor that contributed to the validity of our experiment is that we explored ‘other’ cultures in their own environments, with local actresses for local audiences. This process of work was totally different in nature from the modus operandi of more lavish intercultural productions like Brook’s Mahabharata, where actors from different parts of world were ‘derooted’ and ‘transported’ to Paris, where the production evolved. Our project was also rather different from those experiments in ethno-dramaturgy explored by the

TRANSITION 153

late Victor Turner, who once studied how an African ritual could be recreated by American actors and research students in a New York loft, with American symbols replacing the ‘original’ details in the ethnography. For us, the ‘ethnography’ of our work came from the cities in which we were performing. Our ‘truth’ was constantly challenged by the immediacies of our environments. Request Concert in Calcutta had to be staged in Kasba, while the productions in Bombay and Madras were directly related to the energies of the Chhabildas Theatre in Dadar and Chandra’s open-air theatre on Elliots Beach. Looking back on these productions, I don’t see how they could have been envisioned on a ‘neutral’ territory somewhere in the laboratory of an American theatre department or a Soho loft. In these alien spaces, the examination of ‘Indian culture’ would have become a self-conscious exercise in the ‘restoration of behaviour’, where the realities of the culture being explored would have been simulated rather than directly confronted. Of course, it could be argued that all theatre is simulation at a fundamental level. But there are simulations grounded in reality, others which are twice removed from it and yet others which have no connection with reality at all. I think a lot of intercultural work in the theatre today would fall into the last category. At a time when the materials of ‘other’ cultures are becoming more available through actual borrowings or demonstrations in international seminars (where concepts like the ‘restoration of behaviour’ and the benefits of ‘cultural tourism’ are sanctified), I think one must assert the value of living in the cultures that one is exploring. By living, I don’t mean ‘experiencing’ a culture through artefacts like documents, ethnographies, slides, performance techniques. I mean something much more basic like participating in the everyday life of ‘other’ cultures, which is made up of those familiar actions like eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, selling, buying, laughing, quarrelling, which are shared by people all over the world, but which are also concretized and perceived in specific ways. At this point, I should emphasize that I am not advocating a ‘communion’ with people from ‘other’ cultures. To a large extent, I share Clifford Geertz’s scepticism regarding ‘communion’ which he articulates in his essay,’ “From the Native’s Point of View”: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’: Whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems…Understanding the form and pressure of…the natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke—or, as I have suggested, reading a poem—than it is like achieving communion. (Geertz 1985, p. 70)

154 RETROSPECT

However, one should also point out the theoretical strictures, if not the presumption, of ‘reading’ another culture and figuring out its ‘symbol systems’, independently of one’s participation in its activities and flow of life. I must reiterate the necessity of confronting the life of the people whom one is representing on stage. But is this possible? Within the confines of any project? I am aware of raising a problem here insofar as I seem to be advocating the primacy of direct encounters, of an essentially empirical research. Perhaps, it would be best for me to qualify that I am making this statement with particular reference to the Request Concert project. Other intercultural experiments, whether they involve a performance of Kabuki in Kansas City or Peter Brook’s Mahabharata in Paris, would need to be contextualized within their own distances and fictional proximities to ‘other’ cultures. But in Request Concert, the premise was very clear. We needed to live in a particular city and participate in as much of its daily life as possible before representing its energies on stage through the mediation of a particular text Our interaction was as much with the cities as with the actresses who embodied them. IN OTHER CULTURES In India, despite the shifts in cultural contexts, I nonetheless knew where I was. I saw how with all our particular differences, we (in India) belong to the same cultural continuum, even though our movements and rhythms within it may be different, the same history (despite regionalism, communal tensions and the recent spate of secessionist movements). Though one cannot be too euphoric about India’s political unity, it cannot be denied that our country is still integrated culturally through the most diverse and intricate links and correspondences. Perhaps, my encounter with ‘other’ cultures in India could be more accurately described as intracultural rather than intercultural. The intervention of a foreign (German) text merely highlighted the innate particularities of specific cultures that, for all their differences, are intrinsically related. My problems with interculturalism began when I worked with the same ‘foreign’ text in a totally foreign culture, as in Indonesia, Korea and Japan. Only then did I confront my own ‘otherness’ in relation to the text and my very ‘foreignness’ in other cultures. In a sense, I was even more ‘foreign’ than Manuel who had visited these countries before, while this was my first exposure to them. Besides, he had the constant ‘companionship’ of Kroetz’s text in German, while I had neither German nor Indonesian, Korean or Japanese. Significantly, my English became even more remote as I travelled further away from India.

TRANSITION 155

THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE One cannot limit an insight into ‘other’ cultures through an awareness of their languages, though I must admit that language remains one of the most concrete embodiments of any culture. One unfortunate aspect of interculturalism is its seeming disregard for, if not transcendence of, the linguistic specificities of nation-states. Though this premise was not endorsed in our project, I cannot deny that we were able to embark on so many Asian adaptations of Request Concert precisely because the play had no words. It was through the gestures of the woman in addition to the background sounds of city life, and the radio and television programmes, that we were able to enter the ‘languages’ of other cultures. Even without knowing the (spoken) language of a particular country, one could argue that it is possible to perceive many aspects of its culture. The very silence of a traveller can sensitize his faculties of seeing and feeling. One should also acknowledge how much can be communicated through gestures and expressions in our predominantly logocentric world. However, it should also be admitted that the omnipresence of images that one absorbs in this non-linguistic state of being can be numbing after some time. In retrospect, one realizes that one’s seeming insights into another culture amount to mere impressions. Friendships turn out to be intense acquaintances. The ‘other’ culture remains unknown, the source of fantasies rather than an illumination of history. In Korea, we faced our first direct obstacle with words. Most of the artists we encountered spoke English with difficulty, despite their need to speak the language well (preferably with an American accent). This problem was intensified by the particular adaptation of Request Concert that Manuel had in mind for the production in Seoul. Complementing our early attempt to explore the gestural language of Bharat Natyam in Madras, Manuel was eager to explore the traditional one-person operatic form of p’ansori, which may be one of the few traditional forms in Korea that has survived the onslaught of technology. In the Korean production, therefore, Request Concert would not be danced: it would be sung. Though this sounds like a coup de théâtre, it also raised numerous problems. Our first challenge, as always, was to adapt Kroetz’s text in a Korean context, but then we had to go one step further. We had to convert this adaptation into a libretto that could be sung by a p’ansori singer with all the vocal conventions, epithets, similes and idioms that one associates with the tradition. This would be the first time that the life of a working woman would be the subject matter for a p’ansori recital. I need hardly add that our ignorance of the Korean language necessitated a total reliance on translators, scriptwriters and librettists. But we also had to find a performer, like Chandralekha, who was not just aware of a traditional performance, but who was committed (and interested in the first place) to stretch the vocabulary and premises of this performance within a contemporary social context.

156 RETROSPECT

It was hard to find such a performer, and the Korean production had to be postponed twice. For my own part, I realized my total inability to participate in the production meaningfully, not only because I was insufficiently aware of p’ansori’s complexities, but more crucially, because I didn’t know the Korean language at all. In this case, the linguistic demands of the production clearly challenged the intercultural constraints of the project and our own preparation to deal with them. Being in Seoul also made me aware how traditional cultures survive in capitalist societies with highly developed technologies and infrastructures. The endurance of p’ansori in this highly Americanized culture is obviously a subject that would need a detailed inquiry over an extended period of time. For my own part, I realized that I could not sustain this inquiry, either financially or emotionally. I needed to return to India in order to confront my own traditional cultures within the tensions and immediacies of my history. The more I travelled, the more I realized that I was postponing the possibilities of addressing my own ‘sources’. Therefore, it was necessary not to adapt a ‘culture of choice’, but to return to my home city of Calcutta, whose tumultuous blending of cultures forms the background to this essay, even as I write it. PROFESSIONALISM After barely five months working on Request Concert in Jakarta, Seoul, and more fleetingly, in Tokyo, I realized that there was no point in perpetuating my ‘foreignness’. Of course, there were lessons to be learned about the varying systems of theatrical production in different parts of Asia. After working with shoe-string budgets in India in a predominantly ‘amateur’ set-up (which is the base for most serious theatre work in India), it was somewhat unreal to be sponsored by Parco, one of the largest department stores in Japan, for our production in Tokyo. Even Manuel, who has worked in the most professional theatres in Germany and with Hal Prince at the New York State Theatre, could not help wondering at the ultra-professionalism of the Japanese theatre scene. Neither of us was too sure whether to be amused or awed when we met the Japanese production team for the first time. I need hardly add that the meeting started promptly on time, quite unlike our rehearsals in Jakarta and Calcutta, which invariably began an hour or so late, after leisurely cups of hot tea. The most immediate topic for discussion in the production meeting concerned the design for the poster. Manuel had suggested that some photographs should be taken of our actress, Yoshiyuki-san, depicting some natural, everyday gestures from the play. Imagine our surprise when we were presented with at least five albums of over a hundred photographs. None of them was quite to our satisfaction, so another photo-session was arranged, where another couple of hundred photographs were taken, thereby confirming the reproductive capacities of the Japanese.

TRANSITION 157

I’m not sure how much the photo-session cost, but the soundtrack for the production cost around $3,000, which was almost the total budget for the three productions in India. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that if the Japanese spend money, it is not only because they can afford to do so, but that they are so obsessed by perfection (primarily on the technical level) that they are willing to spend as much as possible in order to guarantee success. The very idea of failure is unacceptable to Parco, which operates on the principle that money guarantees professionalism, and professionalism ensures success. It’s the Old Broadway ethic adapted to the Japanese system of production. INNER/OUTER SPACES Apart from the system of work in Japan, there were other observations to be made of the dichotomy that exists between the outer and the inner worlds of the Japanese. In Tokyo, for instance, we found it almost impossible to enter a private home. Manuel put it very well: here if you want to meet someone, you will be taken to a restaurant; in Indonesia, you begin by entering the ‘formal’ room or parlour, and only gradually are you allowed to enter the other rooms of the house; but in India, especially in a city like Calcutta, you find yourself sitting on the bed of your hosts, drinking tea and eating muri (puffed rice). Eventually, we came to know how most Japanese live in the tiniest, most claustrophobic spaces imaginable, cluttered with commodities. It is in these messy inner spaces, I imagine, that they can afford to relax and be themselves. And perhaps, it is for this very reason, that they don’t like people (particularly foreigners) to see them in this state. Their perfection would be subverted through vulnerability. READING CULTURES Though there is some validity in this insight, I also realize its inadequacy, based as it is on my own cultural assumptions. How can one fully grasp the elusive relationship between the inner and outer realms of being as manifest in different cultures? This requires much more than observation or the systematic study of ‘other’ cultures. For instance, in Indonesia, I had been prepared by my close reading of Clifford Geertz to note that ‘the felt realm of human experience’ or batin and the ‘observed realm of human behaviour’ or lair, should not be regarded as ‘functions of one another, but as independent realms of being to be put in proper order independently’. This sounds like good theory, but how does one actually respond to a Javanese, when a smiling ‘yes’ turns out to be an embarrassed ‘no’, or when tentativeness is actually a sign of hospitality. We in India tend to believe that when people don’t mean what they say, they are dishonest. But in Indonesia, people may not say what they mean, and yet be very truthful. There may be rules for the understanding of ‘other’ cultures, but these cannot be assumed through mere readings of ethnographies and anthropological accounts by ‘experts’. Nor can they be obtained through fake empathies with

158 RETROSPECT

‘natives’ on the basis of brief, intense ‘friendships’. I suppose that if one wants to understand another culture, there is no way out but to live there for long periods of time. Only then can one confront one’s own mediation of its realities, without which one can never truly understand how people represent themselves to one another. If interculturalism is born through the meeting of the self and the ‘other’, the real challenge is to maintain the reciprocity of this dynamic. All too often, the self, or more precisely the ego dominates over the ‘other’ culture, which becomes a mere extension of one’s own ethos. In exploring ourselves through another culture, one must ask what that particular culture receives from our intervention. Of what use is it if we alone gain from the encounter? NATIONALISM VS INTERCULTURALISM While travelling through Asia, I found that India was always a point of reference for most of my observations. The ‘other’ culture was useful only insofar as it reinforced or clarified my own sense of history. Sometimes, this was inevitable, when I confronted the colonial history of a country like Indonesia, which received its Independence at approximately the same time as India did in 1947. The process of colonization, of course, was decidedly different: whereas the Dutch specialized in the most ruthless economic exploitation (by the early nineteenth century, the ‘cultivation system’ had reduced Java to a Dutch plantation), the British worked harder at colonizing our minds, apart from appropriating our natural resources and wealth. Today, both countries are living with the residue of past oppressions and bureaucracies. Unavoidably, I was compelled to confront how Indonesia had managed to uphold a ‘national culture’ and a ‘national language’ through its omnipresent credo of the Panca Sila and nationalist principles enforced through gotong royong (‘mutual support’), rukun (‘harmonious unity’), and the musyawarah (‘process of decision-making through mutual consultation’). Being in Indonesia made me realize how impossibly free we are in India, but it also made me question whether political repression is obligatory for a semblance of national unity in a multicultural, multilingual society. Inevitably, these thoughts about nationalism made me question its relationship to interculturalism. One of the most ardent supporters of interculturalism, Richard Schechner, clearly sees the birth of nation-states as one of the greatest deterrents, if not destroyers of intercultural exchange in our world. In his essay entitled ‘The End of Humanism,’ he states: Clearly nationalism, and its rivalries, armaments, boundaries—culminating in the nuclear catastrophe of mass extinction—is something we humans are going to have to learn to get rid of. Learn to be intercultural? More like unlearn what is blocking us from returning to the intercultural. (Schechner 1982, p. 71)

TRANSITION 159

While this position clearly reveals that Schechner can afford to transcend nationalist strictures, since the political unity and power of the United States are unquestionable, I believe that we have to be much more cautious in countries like India and Indonesia, where nationalism has emerged only in the last four decades after centuries of colonial rule. Whether we like it or not, we have to strengthen our idea of the nation in India, which is being challenged from all directions, even though we may not necessarily accept the interpretations of ‘national integration’ provided by our government. In this context, a blind adherence to interculturalism (as conceived by Schechner) could lead to a diffusion of energies in defining what is ‘national’ in our culture. It goes without saying that there is no ‘national culture’ worth its name in India that does not take into account the multicultural manifestations of our history. The challenge in India is to create a ‘national culture’ that does not homogenize the specificities of our so-called ‘regional’ cultures. What passes off as ‘national’ in the guise of tamashas, utsavs, melas, parades and television serials about terrorism and the Partition, needs to be supplemented, if not substituted, by a different interaction and linking of specific cultures in India. The point is not to negate nationalism through interculturalism, but to incorporate the immediacies of particular histories and languages within an intracultural framework of thought and action, at once coherent and respectful of differences. WORKING IN INDONESIA Indonesia provided an ideal site in which to test the contradictions of a postcolonial heritage. Dutifully, I attempted to situate Kroetz’s text within the specificities of the Indonesian socio-political condition. But can I deny that all my research on ethnicity, marriage laws, women’s organizations, censorship, were merely dramaturgical pretexts, at a certain level, for my lack of absorption in Indonesian culture? I was acutely aware that in six weeks I could do nothing but scratch the surface of Javanese codes and conventions, which are perhaps more intricate than any other form of behaviour to be found in the world. The subtleties of gestures, greetings, smiles, witticisms, evasions, rejections and varieties of silence, eluded me. I had no choice, therefore, but to accept the role of the observer rather than the participant. I might also add that interculturalism is ultimately circumscribed by the availability of visas. As an Indian, I was given a one-month visa which I managed to extend for two weeks at a tremendous cost and after frequent visits to the Imigrasi. My limited stay in Indonesia, therefore, was not a matter over which I had any control. Manuel’s position was rather different. As a German, he faced no visa problems. In fact, he had returned to Indonesia several times in the last two years, making it his ‘second home’. Now this was his opportunity as a buley (foreigner) to express what he had learned of Indonesian culture through a specific

160 RETROSPECT

production. This was his means of returning something to a culture for which he had a very genuine regard. And yet, as I observed him attempting to function within the elusive contours of Javanese society, avoiding confrontation as much as possible, I saw to my amusement how German he really was. Ultimately, the production had less to do with Kroetz, or the actress, or the character, or for that matter, with Indonesia than with Manuel and his intercultural tensions and energies in relation to Indonesia. He was the underlying subject matter of the entire production. TERRITORY If I had to locate the source of the production’s tension, I would focus on the idea of ‘territory’. But before elaborating on this idea, I believe that some background to the production is necessary. I arrived in Jakarta to find that we had no sponsor, no production team, and a budget that had already been used up for the set. Our original sponsor was supposed to be Rendra, one of Indonesia’s most radical poets, but at the very last minute, after his production of Oedipus had bombed in the box-office, reducing his producer to a state of near-bankruptcy, we were left with no financial or organizational support. It was around this critical time that Manuel inherited a private house in the posh area of Kemang in Jakarta, which was owned by a German professor who needed someone to ‘house-sit’ while she was visiting her family in Germany. To cut a very long and complicated story short, our production was staged in the garden of this bungalow, with a swimming pool dividing the fancy patio from the lower-middle-class dwelling of the set. In this juxtaposition of two distinct social realities—the kampung (working-class neighbourhood) and the ‘white man’s ghetto’—our production acquired its particular tension. The irony was that the ‘ghetto’ was the only space that we could afford. The state theatres in the cultural complex of TIM proved to be too expensive for us to rent. I was also apprehensive of this government cultural centre which is closely controlled by guards and officials. I once attended a poetry-reading there which was watched by battalions of military men in crew cuts. Clearly, the advocacy of ‘free speech’ and ‘spontaneity’ in the reading had the approval of the government. I realized that we needed to be very careful about producing the play with government support, because we were on tourist visas, and the information service, so ubiquitous in Jakarta, could have made our lives difficult. When we learned that a police license would be necessary for our production, Manuel intervened in the most ingenious manner possible. He appointed Amat, our night watchman (who was also the technical director of the production) to obtain the license as the official producer of the entire event. Eventually, Pilihan Pendengar (as Request Concert was called in Jakarta) was staged as part of the celebrations in honour of the Indonesian Independence Day.

TRANSITION 161

It was rousing to see the working-class community of servants, houseboys and guards on our street, participate in the production process. As in all exclusive areas in Third World cities, where the foreigners and businessmen live, there is always a lane where the ‘other half’ of society exists, almost invisibly, silently. In Kemang, this lane was just a minute away from our house, and yet its world was totally secluded. I think it is of some social significance that the kampung dwellers in Kemang were invited to enter the ‘white man’s house’ for a free show, which was followed by a discussion. This was the first time that many of them had entered this kind of residence. Earlier, some of the leaders in the kampung had performed a selamatan (religious feast) on the set, providing an auspicious note to the entire production. These attempts to open the ‘territorial’ limits of our ‘residence’ were not consciously planned. They evolved along with the social relationships generated through the entire production process. Not having a production team, we were compelled to enlist the services of whoever was available—our cook provided us with tapes of pop songs that were used in the radio programme while old ‘Pak, the senior servant, was eventually cajoled into accepting the role of stage manager. Inevitably, the servants involved their friends from the kampung, who were curious about our activity, and together we formed a production team. SOEHARTO AS SPECTATOR Once, when Manuel wanted a photograph of Soekarno, it was interesting to observe the reactions of our working-class participants. Initially, they were apprehensive, but then, after much excitement, they brought forward many portraits of this deposed charismatic hero. Then, when some journalists saw Soekarno’s photograph on the set, their reaction was so paranoid that Manuel felt it was probably safer and more appropriate if Soeharto could be displayed on stage as he is in most homes and shops, the symbol of Indonesia’s present regime. One of the most subversive moments in the production occurred when our actress, Niniek L.Karim, would complete her cross-stitch wall-hanging, and very innocently place it in front of Soeharto’s portrait. For a moment, this embodiment of political power in Indonesia would be eclipsed. Then, Niniek would click her tongue and search for another place on which to display her ‘work of art’, the back of the sofa. President Soeharto was the uninvited guest of honour in our production. From his portrait, he watched the woman on stage through all her actions. And the audience watched him watching the woman. When the time came for the woman to commit suicide, we found that she did not have the will or the courage to go through with the action. Instead, she sat at the kitchen table and contemplated the pills for a long time. Eventually, she would look into the audience almost soliciting their help in this crucial moment of life or death. For many spectators, notably the feminist poet and writer, Toeti

162 RETROSPECT

Heraty, this moment was ‘threatening’. One got the impression that if the woman did not take her life now, she would do so in the future. As the woman continued to stare at the pills, Soeharto continued to smile at her and at all his dutiful citizens in the audience. Like good Indonesians, they would all return to work the next day under his regime. For me, the continuation of the woman’s life was despairing, particularly in the last moments of the play, as the ‘fourth wall’ of the room was gradually blocked in with planks of wood. The lasting image of the play was of a woman caged in her room, imprisoned indefinitely. TRANSPORTING THE SET Manuel’s brilliant interpretation of the suicide was concretized through the design, which included not merely the house of the woman (made by carpenters from the kampung with indigenous materials), but its situation within the ‘territory’ of an upper-class Kemang residence. Two social orders were made to confront each other in the very environment of the production. Yet another twist was added to the idea of ‘territory’ when Manuel decided that the kampung set, which was actually a room, should not be ‘struck’ after the show in the normal tradition of theatre. Rather, he thought it would be more useful if the set could be transported to the vacant land owned by our theatre friends, who had helped us in the production. They could use this room effectively for their own rehearsals and meetings. So, the set was dismantled in Kemang and then re-erected in another part of Jakarta in a new ‘territory’. But it remained there for only one night. For some inexplicable reason, Manuel reacted to a sudden impulse and retransported the set back to Kemang, just hours after he had helped to dismantle it. He claimed that the roof would not have been strong enough to withstand the monsoons, and our friends had no money to strengthen the architecture of the house. I need hardly add that this decision to convert the ‘set’ into a room, followed by its dismantling and relocation to a new environment, followed in turn by its retransportation to the original site in Kemang, must be as bewildering to you, dear reader, as it was to me when I first heard about these goings-on in Korea. I had not witnessed this scenario of the house myself, because my visa problems had compelled me to leave Jakarta on the very morning when the set was being dismantled. A week later, I heard the rest of the story from Manuel, just before starting the Korean production in Seoul. To be honest, I was not quite sure how to react. Looking at Manuel, I could see that he was utterly drained. He looked like a very weary traveller who had not slept for many nights. But at the same time, I shared the anger and dismay that his Indonesian friends must have felt when they saw the ‘house’ disappear from their own compound. Manuel had not even consulted them about this decision to take the house back to Kemang. Inevitably, this felt rather like giving someone a gift, and then taking it back to ‘keep it safe’. But as Manuel countered, the ‘gift’

TRANSITION 163

would have become a burden to sustain. The house would have gradually fallen apart EPILOGUE Time will tell what will happen to the relationship between Manuel and his Indonesian friends. Will he become their bapak (father), the central figure in any Indonesian social structure, or will he simply merge his cultural identity within their group-ethos? What will he be able to give them that will be of some use to their culture? And what can they give him that will sharpen his sense of being and history? Is Manuel using Indonesia as an experimental ground for his theatreexperience, or is he in a position to interact meaningfully within its historical context? These questions are for Manuel and his friends to explore over the years, if they commit themselves to a relationship in the first place. Perhaps what is most needed in any kind of intercultural work is a long-term commitment. For my part, I know that this commitment has to be explored with communities in India, not just in Calcutta but in smaller places like Heggodu, where I have begun to teach and direct Kannada-speaking students from rural and mofussil backgrounds. I am discovering how much there is to share with my own people that can challenge the differences created through language, class, religion, ideology, economics. Certainly, I don’t need to confront ‘foreign’ cultures outside India in order to find my own bearings in theatre and life. There are sufficiently diverse cultures within India, and sometimes within a single region, that need concentrated attention and work. Though my intercultural days are over, I believe that my intracultural discoveries of my own history and culture are just beginning. The Request Concert project has brought me home. And perhaps, this is the appropriate point where I can end the second part of this book, which I have entitled ‘Transition’. The journey now continues through specifically Indian theatre cultures, both traditional and contemporary, where I attempt to search for alternatives that go beyond the limits of interculturalism. Though the Request Concert project certainly delved into the minutiae of everyday life in India, it needed to be shared with more people. This is not to deny the validity of our audience response, but to acknowledge that a country like India needs larger, more expansive structures of work that can incorporate the participation of a wider range of communities. Now I would like to turn my attention to traditional performances like Krishnattam, which is seen almost every night by pilgrims in the Guruvayur Temple, testifying to the endurance of faith that prevails among our people. In a different context I would also like to deal with the grassroots theatre activity practised by Ninasam in the village of Heggodu in Karnataka, where the films and plays of the world have been made available to thousands of villagers and working-class communities.

164 RETROSPECT

For an exploration of these activities, I invite you to join me on the third part of this theatrical journey, which I have called ‘Returning’. REFERENCES Geertz, Clifford (1985), Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York, Basic Books, Inc. Schechner, Richard (1982), ‘The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-garde’, The End of Humanism, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Part III Returning

166

Chapter 10 Preparing for Krishna

To the silent, protesting voices of hundreds of gurus, actors, dancers, musicians, make-up artists, greenroom attendants, who have shaped Krishnattam over the centuries, but who remain unnamed, forgotten. When you enter a mango orchard, do you count the leaves, the twigs and the branches of the trees? Do you examine the colour of the fruits and compare their sizes? Or do you eat the mangoes? Swami Vivekananda believed that it was more useful to eat the mangoes. ‘Leave this counting of leaves and twigs and notetaking to others’, he advised in Bhakti Yoga. If you want to be a Bhakta, it is not at all necessary for you to know whether Krishna was born in Mathura or in Vraja, what he was doing, or just the exact date on which he pronounced the teachings of the Gita. You only require to feel the craving for the beautiful lessons of duty and love in the Gita. All the other particulars about it and its author are for the enjoyment of the learned. Let them have what they desire. Say ‘Shantih, Shantih’ to their learned controversies, and let us ‘eat the mangoes’. (Vivekananda 1983, p. 16) In this essay, I would like to do precisely that: I want to taste Krishnattam through my savouring of its performance in words. I want to share my experience of Krishna’s play not to reconstruct it for ‘learned’ purposes, but to reflect on the erotics of performance. By ‘erotics’, I mean the texture and grain of a performance, its resonance that draws the spectator into a specific communion. This communion is neither arbitrary nor altogether subjective: it has been shaped by a context of feelings whose history is rooted in bhakti, an intense love for Krishna that necessitates a surrender of the self. What makes this faith so strikingly undoctrinaire is its element of play. Sensations and gestures, rhythms and tones are more appealing to Krishna than pieties and facts. ‘Learned

168 RETURNING

controversies’ are out of place in his theatre of worship. In the actual seeing of Krishnattam, one does not remember the minutiae of the Natyasastra. One simply enjoys the play of Krishna. I cannot claim to be a bhakta, for whom Krishna is God. Nor can I call myself a sahridaya (‘one of similar heart’), who is capable of empathizing with an object after years of discrimination and experience. It would be best to accept myself as a spectator, but one who participates in what he sees, not just a passive onlooker who accepts what is already there. I see what I am prepared to see in relation to what is in me, but this in turn is moulded by the context of what I see. Krishnattam, I believe, cannot be seen outside of Guruvayur, where Krishna is worshipped as Guruvayurappan. This temple is the site of Krishna’s play. With such a sacred location it is not surprising that any attempt to write about Krishnattam as theatre is seriously challenged. This is particularly true when one adapts western performance theories which, for all their assimilation of nonwestern material, fail to confront (and at times, acknowledge) a sense of the divine, without which almost no traditional art of India can be adequately understood. As I examined in the first part of this book, these theories are, perhaps, most revealing of post-modernist modes of thought and states of being that are dominant in the West today. Their preoccupation with structure and technique (at the expense of faith) frequently results in new systems of meaning that reject or tacitly avoid what these performances mean to non-western people in their own cultural context. It is assumed that the ‘scientific’ nature of the analysis based on laws, principles, patterns and energies will be relevant to all people, both in the East and West, the representers and the represented. In preparing for Krishnattam, one must certainly avoid the constraints of western performance theories, but one must be equally wary of a certain kind of ‘authentic’ theatre scholarship that is affirmed in India today. Its style could best be described as the Third Person Omniscient, a heavily Sanskritized rhetoric that amasses ‘facts’ in an encyclopaedic manner without addressing them in any significant way. It is almost as if the utterance of these facts– immutable, unquestionable, forever fixed in time—will carry the weight of their meaning. Any attempt to situate these facts in an historical context is viewed as a threat to ‘objectivity’ and ‘aesthetic purity’ that such scholarship is bound to uphold at all costs. What develops in this surrender of a critical consciousness is an obsessive need to document terms and subdivision of terms, more often than not paraphrased from the Natyasastra. In this minutiae, we have a formidable example of ‘leaf-counting’, where the reader is left without a glimpse of the trees. More bothersome than the pedantry is the abdication of human experience, the rejection of involvement in reading the past. My intention here is not to launch into a diatribe against the ‘learned’, but to point out that the complexities of seeing Krishnattam necessitate a mode of writing that debunks the myth of the perfect spectator. According to Anuradha Kapur, this myth is directly related to the upholding of ‘a single, essentially authentic voice’, which can be subverted only through an exploration of ‘several

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 169

possible voices’, in which the writer can define his complicity to a traditional performance (Kapur 1988, p. 6). Though this ‘complicity’ acknowledges both ‘faulty vision’ and ‘partial vision’, Kapur nonetheless asserts that: In studying traditional theatre, it might be necessary to accept a faulty vision; especially in order to avoid a sort of museology that assumes that forms can be summarized, essentialized, held stable, so as to be successfully ingested by the viewer. (ibid., p. 7) In this context, I have consciously attempted to avoid an essentialist reading of Krishnattam because it would have been untrue to my experience of this multilevelled, highly textured performance tradition. Instead of a ‘seamless overview’, I have preferred to break the narrative, juxtaposing my close description of Krishna’s play and gestures, the erotics of his performance, with more distant (and occasionally, ‘learned’) allusions to the history permeating bhakti. Though my reading of Krishnattam eventually culminates in an acceptance of love that transcends the mediations of ‘rationality and scholarship’, it would be irresponsible, if not disingenuous, on my part, to deny the intervention of historical perspectives in my ‘experience’ of Krishnattam. Undeniably, there are many ‘voices’ in this reflection of Krishna’s play, even a manipulation of perspectives as I move close to certain details and then move away, veering between close-ups and long shots in my seeing of Krishnattam. If these elements appear ‘partial’ and even ‘faulty’, I can only hope that they resist the myth of omniscience by providing doubts, questions and perhaps a few clues as to how traditional theatre can be seen and represented. Perhaps it would be only appropriate to acknowledge that in preparing for Krishna, writing about him poses as many challenges as seeing him in action. If I had wanted to assert an aura of omniscience, I could easily have made a false start: ‘Performed in the sacred precincts of the Guruvayur Temple, Krishnattam is a dance-drama cycle in eight parts that celebrates the life of Lord Krishna. Attributed to Prince Manavedan, later the Zamorin of Calicut, who reigned between 1655 and 1658, this ancient art (the forerunner of Kathakali) has been inspired by Gita Govinda and the Narayaneeyam….’ And so on. Already in this seemingly incontestable statement, there is a problem of perspective. Manavedan is designated as the creator of Krishnattam, when in actuality he is the author of Krishnagithi, a poetic text of padams (songs) and slokas (verses) written in eight parts, that serves as the ‘dramatic text’ of Krishnattam. Unfortunately, most pundits fail to distinguish between ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’, revealing a definite bias for what has been written rather than for what could have been performed. Actors, unfortunately, do not write performance history: they act. Their representation (or rather, non-representation) is determined by scholars who assume that the ‘dramatic text’ is the performance, when in actuality (as in the case of Krishnattam), they may have a very

170 RETURNING

ambivalent relationship, not based on illustration or correspondence, but on counterpoint, contradiction, if not outright negation. In this context, it is essential to note that the actors (or dancers) are sharply differentiated from the singers in Krishnattam. It is the singers who are directly in touch with Manavedan’s text, which they sing in the background accompanied by drums and cymbals. The actors, on the other hand, are connected to this text primarily through the tala (rhythmic cycle), which provides them with cues for their movements and gestures. What is significant to note is that the actors do not follow the details of Manavedan’s text. More often than not, their ‘performance text’ has nothing to do with the ‘dramatic text’. When I questioned the oldest guru, Sri C. Sankaran Nair on the matter, he firmly emphasized that the actors are not meant to follow the text. During his own apprenticeship, this was a golden rule, though today the younger (more ‘progressive’) gurus feel that the actors should study the text so that they can act ‘better’. To my mind, the situation is extremely paradoxical: the older guru, in upholding the separation of the spoken word and the action, seems to be more ‘progressive’ (if one thinks of Brecht and other advocates of non-illusionist dramaturgy) than the younger gurus, who seem to be advocating a correlation of the narrative and the choreography in a more illustrative manner. There is, of course, an underlying social reality for the separation of song and dance in Krishnattam: the caste system. By tradition only the Brahmins and the ambalavasis (the temple-serving caste) are permitted to sing and chant within the temple precincts. All the lower castes, including the Nairs, who were originally employed as soldiers in the Zamorin’s court, have the freedom to act and dance, but they cannot sing. Though this restriction does not affect the Koodiyattam performers because they are all chakyars, the most highly-ranked among the ambalavasis, it definitely differentiates the dancers from the singers in Krishnattam. Today, out of the 56 members in the troupe, there are 37 Nairs (19 dancers, 8 maddalam players, 4 make-up artists, 5 stage and greenroom attendants and one dhobi). All the remaining performers, notably the musicians and some of the dancers, are Brahmins and ambalavasis. Even to this day, despite the opening of the temple to all castes, restrictions relating to the performance of a temple art continue to be strongly upheld. Though the Nairs are permitted to learn the Sanskrit verses of Krishnagithi, they cannot render it aloud during the performance.1 Perhaps this taboo has discouraged most of the performers from attempting to learn the text in the first place. Excluded from the art of vocalization, they focus on the expressive powers of the body. Unlike the musicians, who sing Manavedan’s text in a style closely associated with sopanam, where the voice is not ‘swung’ from one note to the next but made to vibrate with devotional fervour, the dancers create their own ‘performance text’ made up of gestures, movements and tableaux. As I mentioned earlier they pick up their central cues not from the words of Krishnagithi but from the tala beaten by the chengala player, who is expected to conduct the entire performance. It is through the rhythmic beats of chempa

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 171

chempata, panchari, thriputa, adantha that the dancers create their choreography, wherein the theatrical meaning of Krishna’s play is richly textured and consolidated. Krishnagithi, therefore, is merely a constituent of a larger ‘performance text’ created by the musicians and dancers. At best, one could say that Manavedan intended his text to be danced and sung rather like Ashtapadi attam, the dance performance accompanying the songs of the Gita Govinda that he must have seen performed in his own palace. Like Jayadeva, Manavedan specifies the raga and tala for each padam in his text. But he does not specify any act or scene divisions, no entrances of characters, no use of the hand-held curtain (thirassila) that punctuates the rapid scene changes in Krishnattam. Indeed, how Manavedan’s text was ultimately transformed into a nrtta-natakam (dancedrama) remains a mystery. Today Krishnattam is best remembered for its delicate choreography, its intricate blending of natyadharmi and lokadharmi conventions.2 And yet none of the gurus can say how this choreography evolved over the centuries, how the conventions blended with the rarefied performance tradition of Koodiyattam and the more earthy influences of ritual performances like Theyyam and Mudiyettu. No one can be entirely sure about how Krishnattam incorporated masks into its elaborate structure of aharya (costumes, make-up) or how it juxtaposed formal hand gestures (hastas) with the simpler gestures of folk dances like Kaikottikali. All these hows remain speculative, lost in the ephemeral history of theatre. In this context, it is a pity that no attaprakaram of Krishnattam has come down to us over the centuries, because it could have authenticated the ‘performance text’ through its stage directions and details of choreography. In the absence of such a manuscript (which Brecht might have described as a modelbuch), we can speculate that the Zamorin family did not want Krishnattam to be copied by other rulers and troupes. As the exclusive owners of a traditional performance (one might call them monopolists), they fed, clothed, sheltered and paid the actors, while keeping them within their administrative control. All the gurus and actors were based in Calicut, the headquarters of the Zamorin family, from where they would travel once a year to Guruvayur and back. On the way, they would perform in temples, palaces, Nambutiri households and of course Guruvayur itself, where there was always an obligatory performance of the entire cycle of plays in the temple. Today, the ownership of the Krishnattam troupe has been transferred to the Guruvayur Devaswom, an impressive temple bureaucracy. Under this new administration, the familial bond between the gurus and their shishyas has almost completely broken down. Now they are all employees of the Devaswom, receiving monthly salaries between Rs 600 and Rs 1500 with all the usual government benefits such as sick leave and a pension. A certain degree of complacency has entered the actors, not only because they are economically secure, but because they continue to face no competition: Krishnattam remains a one-troupe theatre. Most unfortunately, the gurus are now compelled to retire

172 RETURNING

before they are 60, which is the age when most gurus begin to impart their real secrets. One sees here a blatant instance of how the ‘democratization’ of a working system can go against the creative growth of a traditional art. ‘In the old days, the actors used to live for their art’, Guru Paramaeswara Panikkar confided in me, ‘but now the art survives for the benefit of the actors.’ Though Panikkar himself used to receive only 75 paisa per performance till the early 1950s, he had no regrets. He recalls the good food and oil, the profuse supply of dhotis that he used to receive from his patrons. Most of all, he remembers the respect that he obtained as an actor from the community at large. Once, when he was playing the child Krishna at an early age, a woman from a Nambutiri household was so overcome with emotion that she offered to give him milk from her breasts. Though this bond between the actors and spectators is not so close anymore, it is still perceptible during the performances of Krishnattam, The administration of Guruvayur may have changed, but the spirit of Guruvayurappan remains what it is. To see Krishnattam we have to enter his sacred precinct, which is also his field of play. Imagine a child standing absolutely still, an ornate figurine. He is sculpted in space, enclosed in a heavy skirt that protrudes on all sides, a full-sleeved jacket, breastplate, armbands, jewellery and a conical crown with a peacock feather stuck in it. His face is deep green, his eyes lined with collyrium, his lips painted red. Framing the face is the chutti, a white border made out of rice-flour paste, that accentuates the mask-like face with a strange density. This still figure is Lord Krishna himself. Barely three feet high, he stands before his mother Yashoda as she listens to the gopis complain about her son’s misdeeds—breaking pots, sharing milk with the cat, eating mud, swinging on a rope basket, and of course, stealing butter. This ‘picture of innocence’, whose mischief ‘intoxicates’ the gopis, listens impassively.3 Then gradually, and ever so slightly, he begins to move his foot. A dusty, dirty foot, a visible sign of his incessant play. It grazes against the ground, ‘tracing patterns of dust on the earth’ (padena oorvyam likhantam). It is not a stylized movement, but a totally ‘natural’ gesture that gains in intensity through its repetition. Then, along with the sliding foot, the figure makes another ‘natural’ gesture—this time, a slow wave of the hand as if to deny the gopis’ complaints. His immobility is contradicted by these two secretive gestures of hand and foot. He undermines his own divinity through guiltiness. Suddenly, the figure moves out of his frame and prostrates himself before his mother, who stands stoically with a stick in her hand. A real stick, the kind all children fear. At this point, Krishna ceases to be a figure: he becomes a child-god bowing before his mother. Yashoda throws the stick away, and picks her son up in her arms, carrying him astride her hip. The gopis cluster around them and caress Krishna’s face, feet and arms. Only then, at this particular climax of emotions, when it is possible to caress God like a child, do I realize the obvious: all the gopis and Yashoda are played by men. The women in Krishnattam are men.

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 173

And Krishna? He’s just a boy after all, or so he seems, after appearing as God, then a child-god, and finally, an actor As he pads back to the greenroom after the thirassila has been drawn, I see him approaching the doorway to the temple kitchen that leads to the greenroom upstairs. Here in the kitchen, rabbits frisk behind enormous cauldrons and vessels: they are the gifts of temple devotees. Another gift awaits Krishna. He is met at the doorway by an old woman who prostrates herself before him. Immediately (or so it seems), the divinity in Krishna reasserts itself. He stands absolutely still as he accepts the woman’s dakshina, an offering of money and flowers. Then the woman steps aside, and the young actor runs into the greenroom to remove his make-up. It is nearly 2 a.m. when the sky is pitch-black, time for everyone to snatch an hour of sleep before the temple is opened at 3 a.m., when Lord Krishna can be seen in his sanctum for nirmalya darshan. Even gods have schedules to follow. There is a time to act and a time to be worshipped. The story goes that during a performance of the Rasakreeda, the third play in the Krishnattam cycle, that the Lord himself played truant from his sanctum. Bored perhaps by his relentless routine, he entered the performance area and participated in the rasa with Krishna and the gopis. The saintly Vilvamangalam saw two Krishnas dance in that particular performance. He promptly insisted that Krishnattam should be performed only after temple hours, which is generally around 10 p.m. after the final procession and pujas have been completed. Then only is it appropriate for Krishna to play. From this story, it becomes obvious that Krishnattam is circumscribed by the space and time of the temple. Krishna’s play is on sanctified ground, performed on the north-west side of the temple between the sanctum sanctorum and the outer wall. The performance space is almost directly parallel to the garbhagriha, where the deity is enclosed. In such a space, fully consecrated and blessed with daily rituals and processions, it would be altogether incomplete (as I have suggested earlier) to think of Krishnattam as theatre. The word ‘play’ is more congenial to the Lord’s temperament and lila. But perhaps the most accurate term by which Krishnattam can be perceived is chakshusha-yajna, a ‘visual sacrifice’. The actors offer themselves to Krishna through their performance, which in turn serves as a medium through which the spectators can direct their devotion. In a very literal sense, the play can be offered as a vazhivadu on the payment of a fee to the temple authorities. In relation to some expensive pujas, Krishnattam is cheap—a night’s performance costs only Rs 650. Even though this is a steep price by middle-class economic standards in India, performances for Krishnattam are booked weeks in advance. Understandably, the most popular plays are Avatharam and Swayamvaram, which are offered in celebration of birth and marriage respectively, two of the most common occurrences in life. Swargarohanam, on the other hand, is rarely performed not only because it commemorates Krishna’s ‘death’ and ascent to Heaven, but because the play is more expensive, requiring a generous supply of flowers and oil: Krishna leaves our earth in style. Moreover, the donor is obliged to pay for an additional

174 RETURNING

performance of Avatharam, which must follow any performance of Swargarohanam. Death must be followed by birth, or else Krishnattam would be thoroughly inauspicious. The other plays appeal to the devotees on the basis of their thematic content. Kaliyamardanam, which focuses on Krishna’s killing of the serpent-king Kaliya, is offered for cures from snake-bite and skin-related diseases; Rasakreeda, the eternal round of love and separation featuring Krishna, Radha and the gopis, is beneficial for unmarried girls and disputes between couples. Kamsavadha, which depicts Krishna’s killing of his evil uncle, Kamsa, comes in useful during family feuds, while Banayuddham, where the killing of the demon-king Banasura is prevented by Lord Shiva’s intervention, is an all-purpose offering. It is useful both as a preventive against enemies and as a means to secure Shiva’s blessings. Vividavadham is offered for prosperity and favours relating to agriculture because of Balaram, Krishna’s brother, who is featured prominently in this play with his plough and pestle. Just as these offerings have very concrete purposes, the entire structure of Krishnattam is, at once, blessed and utilitarian. Rituals become part of the mechanics of the performance. Prayers also serve as cues. No performance can start without the lighting of the central oil lamp, the vilakku, which has to be lit by a Brahmin. Only then can the musicians and drummers pick up their four instruments that are placed in front of the lamp. The thopi maddalam, the suddha maddalam, the chengala and the elathalam are more than drums and cymbals: they are carriers of sound-energies that embody the divine. No actor (including Krishna) can make his entrance before touching these instruments in order to receive their blessings. Once the musicians pick up the instruments, the keli begins, a percussive announcement heralding the imminence of the play. On cue, two of the pettikar or stage hands hold up the multi-coloured rectangular thirassila behind the lamp and in front of the musicians. Behind this curtain, there is a hidden space, the sacred ground of the performance, which is first touched by four female characters, fully costumed and bedecked in their minukku (‘polished’) makeup. Here in this concealed space, they dance the thodayam, a formal piece set to fixed tala. No one in the audience is meant to see this dance; it is performed specifically to invoke the blessings of Ganapati, Vishnu and Devi. But if the performers dance for the gods, they also dance for themselves in preparation for the performance. The thodayam is also a kind of warm-up. One of the challenges in writing about Krishnattam, or for that matter, any traditional performance in India, is to find the exact balance between utility and grace. In demystifying the sacred by rooting it in a concrete theatrical context, it is only too easy to forget that Krishna is a god. His play is not just play but divine play, as David Kinsley elaborates in his writings on Krishna (Kinsley 1979). The people who watch Krishnattam (and for whom Krishnattam exists) are pilgrims. For them, the concrete signs in the performance are both real and

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 175

sacred, indicative of the here-and-now and constantly suggestive of another time from an earlier yuga. A few feet behind the performance space of Krishnattam, there is a very innocuous sign on the ceiling. It has to be pointed out to you before you can see it: a very precise hole, almost as if the cement has been deliberately removed from the ceiling. The sign is particularly conspicuous because the ceiling is new. (It was reconstructed shortly after the devastating fire in the Guruvayur Temple of November 1970). Every day when a miniature image of the deity is mounted on an elephant and carried three times around the temple, the procession stops directly under this hole. The music is silenced, in which time Shankaracharya, the great Advaitya philosopher, can seek the forgiveness of Guruvayurappan. Now what does a hole have to do with soliciting divine grace? It appears that Shankaracharya was once flying in the air one Ekadashi day with that eternal troublemaker, Narada muni. When Narada suggested that they receive Krishna’s darshan at Guruvayur on that auspicious day—the only day, one should add, when the temple was open to all castes—Shankaracharya dismissed the significance of popular rituals, appropriate for mere bhaktas, not jnyanis, the possessors of absolute knowledge. Scarcely had he advanced on his celestial flight when Shankaracharya fell through the roof of the Guruvayur Temple on the northern side and promptly asked the Lord to forgive him. The story ends that he was forgiven but only after he had promised to regularize the temple schedule—the panchamahapujas, daily rituals, processions and rites which are meticulously followed to this day. I insert this story in my narrative to remind myself that seemingly insignificant details like a hole in the ceiling of the Guruvayur Temple (and the story connected to it) have been deeply internalized by the pilgrims who watch Krishnattam. For them, the space of the temple is not merely architecture; it has been transfigured through countless myths and legends that are embedded in practically every corner of Guruvayur. Obviously, the story of ‘Shankaracharya’s Fall’ has been ‘made up’, but it has had sufficient appeal and validity to be remembered by millions of people over the centuries. It also continues to be inscribed in the architecture of the Guruvayur Temple, even after its reconstruction. The problem may not lie in the seeming triviality of the story, but in our cynical attitude to it. At one level, all stories are justifications of commonly held beliefs, which may, on occasion, counter the established facts of a particular event, personality or ideology. The fiction surrounding the story is the strategic means through which these beliefs can be expressed. When people lack theories (or fail to understand them), they invent stories. This is their way of asserting a position. In ‘Shankaracharya’s Fall’, it is possible to read a mischievous, yet deliberate debunking of Advaitya philosophy, where the duality of the bhakta in love with a Personal God is supplanted by a metaphysical oneness of man with the Absolute. In this ‘oneness’, there is ‘neither subject, nor object, nor relation’, as Vivekananda puts it, but the Absolute Brahman (Vivekananda 1983, p. 16). So

176 RETURNING

abstruse is this state of being for most bhaktas, so non-representational, that in ‘Shankaracharya’s Fall’ the philosopher has literally to fall from his heights in order to accept the rituals of the people. His abstract logic has to be grounded in the direct, spontaneous experience of bhakti. And therein lies the ultimate significance of the hole in Guruvayur’s ceiling, under which Krishnattam is performed and surrendered to with a total lack of self-consciousness. It is a small, yet concrete sign of the triumph of bhakti over more learned and controversial commentaries. While these have faded into oblivion or are studied in seclusion by a handful of pundits, the hole will be remembered by people for generations to come. It is a silent reminder of faith surviving disbelief, a reassurance to Krishna’s devotees that the most naive and banal of signs are acceptable to the Lord. What matters to him is the immediacy of our love that is concretized through bhakti. Bhakti pervades Krishnattam, the love for Krishna being evoked in any number of ways. Open and beckoning, the spectacle invites the participation of pilgrims, who can feast their eyes on the Lord in his frolic, killings and love. The various scenes provide numerous opportunities for darshan, the curtain being used to conceal the Lord and then opened to display him in all his solitary splendour. As the spectators wait for his entrance, which is always announced with a scattering of flowers, there is a gradual welling of emotions that leads to a climax, which subsides once more into an expectant calm, only to build yet again for another glimpse of Krishna. In this process of seeing and preparing to see Krishna, there is a direct relationship between how Krishna is viewed on stage and how he is worshipped in his sanctum. The actor plays God who is also an actor, while the spectator is a bhakta for whom worship is an act of seeing. Both outside the garbhagriha and in the performance space, Krishna compels the spectator/devotee to surrender to a multitude of ecstasies, intensely personal, yet combining to form a collective joy. No one can see Krishna on our behalf. That meeting of eyes is our personal moment with the deity, full of longing and tense delight. Actually, Krishna does not need to be seen exclusively, because all the characters, including bloodthirsty ones like Poothana and Kamsa, are sanctified in his presence. The entire spectacle of Krishnattam becomes a source for darshan. In this context, it is not uncommon to see spectators fold their hands devoutly even when Krishna is not on stage. During one performance, I saw a sadhu kneel before the bear-king Jambavan, even though Krishna was standing alongside him. Perhaps he felt an affinity for this bhakta in whom Krishna lives. While emphasizing the omnipresence of bhakti in Krishnattam, one should not mystify it. Certainly it is not a force that exists independently of the play. Rather, it is a feeling that exists within the hearts of people, that is extended through the energy of the performance itself. What greatly helps its projection is the immediacy of the narrative, which unfolds before the spectators in a series of picturesque scenes, rather like a good action film. Each scene presents climatic moments—killings, transformations, redemptions, weddings—with all the

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 177

unnecessary preliminaries summarily edited or relegated to the singers. There are no tedious and convoluted flashbacks, because the narrative always moves forwards. Sometimes it jumps very rapidly. For instance, in Banayuddham, within the span of a single scene, Krishna becomes a grandfather. First, we see him approach Shiva in order to restore his son Pradyumna to life. After this elaborate scene, the curtain is drawn, and we are told through the narrative alone how Pradyumna was swallowed by a fish, then rescued by Mayavathi, then married to Rati, then about their son Aniruddha, who is loved by Usha, the daughter of Banasura, who discovers their clandestine relationship and captures Aniruddha. What needs to be emphasized is that the story of Krishna’s life is so well known to the pilgrims that they don’t need to follow this convoluted narrative in Sanskrit (which remains inaudible anyway). These slokas-between-scenes function like intermissions, where the spectators can stretch their legs and prepare for the next scene. As soon as Banasura appears in his Kathi (‘knife’) outfit, appropriate only for arrogant characters, the spectators have already made a leap in time, and are fully prepared to pick up the story at that particular point. The fundamental reason why Krishnattam works so splendidly in conveying bhakti is that it knows how to tell a story, quite unlike Koodiyattam, the most rarefied of performing arts, where the point is not to tell a story but to elaborate on a specific detail or a word in a sloka for hours on end. Not only does Krishnattam reject this obsession for the minuscule, it also avoids the elaborate preliminary rituals of Koodiyattam, its Nirvahana or flashback sequence, and the obligatory four-day vachikabhinaya or vocal tour de force by the Vidushaka on the subjects of love, food, sex and service to the king. In Koodiyattam, all these sequences are preparations for the actual performance, which invariably focuses on the single act of a play. While the preparations could last for as long as two weeks, the act itself is generally performed in three days. This kind of ‘preparation’ would be deadly for bhakti. Krishna’s devotees would probably break out into a riot while waiting for him to appear. What bhaktas need are concrete and accessible signs through which they can convey their love for God. They need to be gratified, and as often as possible. It is not surprising, therefore, that the creators of Krishnattam toned down all the intricacies of abhinaya (acting) that they must have observed in Koodiyattam performances. There is almost a total absence of sattvika abhinaya, because the action in Krishna’s play is too swift to allow the actors time to linger over inner sentiments. The hastas are also much less defined and abstruse. They function independently of the narrative, whereas in Koodiyattam there has to be the closest correspondence between the vacika (speech) and angika (movement, gesture). A sentence has to be grammatically precise both through word and gesture. Significantly, there are gestures for suffixes, tenses, moods and genders (Raja 1964, p. 19). Elisions and omissions are permitted only if the audience is in a position to understand them. Overall, the rule is to take as long as one needs in order to elaborate on the minutest detail in the text. No wonder a one-night

178 RETURNING

performance of Koodiyattam lasts for close to eight hours while a Krishnattam performance is generally over within three. Even Kathakali is a great deal more elaborate than Krishnattam. The preliminaries take a longer time because of the melappadam, the musical overture where the musicians and drummers display their virtuosity, as well as the purappadu, a pure dance that functions independently of the attakatha (literally ‘story of the play’). In Krishnattam, there is no melappadam, and the purappadu is generally the first scene of the play. These editions indicate that the priority lies in the swiftness of the narrative, not in the virtuosity of the performance. Unlike Kathakali, whose celebrated performers are identified with specific roles like Ravana or Hanuman, there are no stars in Krishnattam. Rather it is the ensemble that matters. The most exquisite choreography is not to be found in any of Krishna’s solo dances but in the poochuttal, a group dance, while even minor characters like the wrestlers in Kamsa’s court are totally riveting. Krishna, however, is never overshadowed for too long. Even when he does not dance, his silent presence (or absence) is always felt. He holds the diversity of Krishnattam together. While Kathakali may transport the spectator into another world through its brilliant theatricality, Krishnattam embraces the spectator within the heart of the temple. There is much truth in the popular Malayalam saying: Krishnanattam kanaan kulikkanam, Kathakali kandal kulikkanam. To see Krishnattam, one needs to take a bath in order to purify oneself. But in Kathakali, one needs a bath after the performance (presumably to wash away its impurities). I would like to turn now to a more concrete description of bhakti in its theatrical manifestations. What makes the representation of faith in Krishnattam so extraordinary is its incorporation of ‘realistic’, even grotesque elements. In the scene where Krishna meets Shiva, for instance, there is the most irreverent counterpoint to the meeting of the gods, which is provided by two tiny bhutaganas, followers of Shiva, who look like bedraggled cats. Dressed like the Ghantakarnas who appeared in the earlier scene, they are clad in dusty black tunics and black-and-white masks with red crowns painted on top. These imps sit on the floor behind the sacred lamp and in front of an imposing tableau where Shiva poses with his family. While Krishna presents formal greetings to his divine counterpart, the bhutaganas fidget, scratch, smear their hands with dust, blow their noses, wipe snot on each other’s faces, make obscene gestures, even turn their bums to each other. All this is done in what looks like a totally wild, non-stop improvization, even though I am told that the gestures are carefully planned. While these bhutaganas are lost in their grotesque play, Krishna continues to dance gracefully with ornate mudras, while the musicians sing a padam celebrating Shiva’s beauty with conventional epithets. ‘You, with the Ganga and the crescent moon on your matted hair/You with the eye of fire on your forehead.’ Though these words may be incomprehensible to the spectators, the formality of their rendition accompanied by Krishna’s stately dance and Shiva’s stillness

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 179

totally contradict the grotesquerie of the bhutaganas. And yet, they coexist on the same plane, each functioning independently, and the beauty is that they do not jar. Instead of distracting from the scene, the bhutaganas contribute to its dynamics. Their discordant mischief becomes part of Krishna’s play. If one had to identify a single aspect in Krishnattam’s dramaturgy that concretizes bhakti, it would be the subtle range of lokadharmi conventions that permeate the eight plays in the drama-cycle. In the scene with the bhutaganas, we have seen how their stage business highlights the religious aura of the scene. Very often, the representation of faith in Krishnattam is not conveyed through formal gestures at all, but through very real objects and actions. When Krishna washes Sudama’s feet, he does not mime the action. He actually uses water to wash the feet of his destitute friend, which he then sprinkles over himself with a shudder of delight. This graphic enactment of a god washing his devotee’s feet is the strongest visualization one could hope to find of Sakhya, that particular form of bhakti where God is viewed as a friend in whom we can trust and confide our deepest secrets. Before he washes Sudama’s feet, Krishna has welcomed him spontaneously by running into the audience where Sudama makes his entrance. It would be difficult to say who is more moved: the actor playing Sudama or the audience. In this scene, God is literally in the midst of his spectators. They see him embrace a poor man, who is dressed in a simple dhoti with vibhuti smeared on his arms and chest. Even his umbrella made out of palm leaves is tattered. Under his arm, he holds a small bag of beaten rice. Later in the scene, Krishna eats handfuls of this rice to the absolute joy of the pilgrims. Once again, we have a concrete gesture which dramatizes convincingly that all gifts are precious to the Lord regardless of their value, so long as they are given from the heart. Yet another representative of the poor, more specifically a member of the working class, is the toddy-tapper who appears in the first scene of Vividavadham. Dressed in a simple dhoti with minimal make-up, he approaches Balaram, who is carousing with women in the Raivatha mountains. Carefully the tapper carries his earthen pot on which he balances a small packet of bananaleaves containing pickles. Two social factors are worthy of attention: the toddy is not given free to Balaram even though he could have demanded it. Rather, one of his female companions parts with some jewellery which is given to the tapper in exchange for the toddy. Second, and more significantly, the toddy is handed to Balaram by the tapper himself. In Koodiyattam performances of Mattavilasa, I am told that the toddy is not only placed on the ground but at a distance from the receiving character, so that there is no possibility of contamination. So great was the phobia of being touched by the lower classes that specific distances were allotted to them according to the lowness of their caste. From the history of subaltern communities in Kerala, we learn that the toddy-tappers, who belonged to the Ezhava caste had to stand at a distance of 36 feet from the higher castes. Unavoidably, the representation of the toddy-tapper in Krishnattam raises questions about the caste and class orientation of its creators. The problem is that

180 RETURNING

we do not know when the toddy-tapper first made his appearance on stage. Was he there during Manavedan’s time? Certainly one should not assume from the sympathetic representation of the toddy-tapper today that Manavedan himself was a progressive supporter of the lower castes. His orthodox Brahminical values are clearly exposed in the final scene of Banayuddham, where Krishna preaches the story of King Nriga, who is transformed into a chameleon after being cursed by a Brahmin. Using the story as a fable, Krishna warns his children about the dire consequences following any disrespect shown to the Brahmins. Never covet the property of a Brahmin attracted by desire or avarice. A pleased Brahmin is a kalpaka-vriksha (wish-giving tree in heaven); a displeased one, the all-consuming fire… If you take back what you have given a Brahmin for his modest livelihood, you would be reborn a worm. Kings who offend Brahmins would be unhappy, ill, short-lived and liable to be defeated by enemy kings. (Banayuddham, padam 7) And then, following the padam, Krishna himself declares his own deference to the Brahmins: ‘If a noble Brahmin curses in anger or causes even death, you should not entertain any thoughts of reprisal. Even if I were to offend the Brahmins, I should be duly punished’ (sloka 24). Clearly, the author of these words is not a bhakta in the tradition of Basavanna and the other radical Saranas of twelfth-century Karnataka, whose intense love for Shiva was anti-Brahminical in impulse. In their devotion there was a strong element of protest that extended to all castes of society, who reinterpreted the laws of dharma according to their own laws of social justice and surrender to a Personal God. Manavedan seems closer in spirit to the Alwars, the Vaishnavite saints of south India, who preached bhakti as early as the sixth century AD. The tenth Alwar (and the only representative from the Kerala region) was the founder of the Second Chera Empire, Kulasekhara Varman (800–20 AD), who abandoned his throne for a life of total asceticism. In contrast to these saints, Manadevan’s bhakti is distinctly more restrained, working within a courtly milieu and the Brahminical structure of Hinduism as preached by his two foremost mentors, Vilvamangalam and Narayana Bhattatiri. As a Nair, not even a Kshatriya, Manavedan had no choice but to respect the ritual superiority of the Brahmins, whose anger he had every reason to fear. Early in the fourteenth century, according to K.V.Krishna Ayyar, his family (the Zamorins) had been cursed because of their blasphemous attitude towards a community of Brahmin Mussads, who were the trustees of the Tali temple in Calicut (Menon 1987, p. 95). It appears that the ruling Zamorin had dismissed these Brahmins from the temple because he feared that they were conspiring with his enemies. When they went on a hunger strike, he sentenced some of them to

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 181

death. Later a curse fell on the family, which was removed only after the Zamorin had consulted a Saiva saint and instituted the Revati Pattathanam, the annual assembly of scholars that met in the Tali temple to discuss learned matters. The scholars, who were honoured in these assemblies by the Zamorin, were, of course, exclusively Brahmins. Unlike the Pattathanam, which developed indirectly as a result of the Brahmins’ curse, Krishnattam emerged after the saintly Vilvamangalam had introduced Manavedan to Krishna himself in a vision. After sporting under a kadamba tree in the temple, the Lord disappeared, leaving behind a peacock feather, which is said to have inspired Manavedan to write Krishnagithi. All these are legends, of course, but they inscribe the role of the Brahmins in influencing cultural activities, both ‘intellectual debates’ like the Revati Pattathanam and ‘entertainments’ like Krishnattam. Certainly, Manavedan made no attempt to free himself or even question this Brahminical influence, which he lovingly embraced. Meppattur Narayana Bhattatiri was his unquestioned mentor, not Poontanam Nambutiri, whose devout verses in Malayalam had a larger following among the people. It is said that the Lord himself rated Poontanam’s bhakti higher than Meppattur’s vibhakti (grammar). Yet Manavedan chose to write in the purest Sanskrit, ignoring the dominant trend set by Poontanam and Tunchat Ezhuthachan, who had revolutionized the Malayalam language in his enormously popular retellings of the epics, the Adhyatma Ramayanam and the Sri Mahabharatam. In contrast to this ‘low devotional mode’, at once colloquial and immediate in its utterance, Manavedan upheld a ‘learned’ tradition of bhakti, essentially ‘civilized’ and remote from the everyday needs and dreams of the people.4 I mention these facts not to belittle Manavedan’s contribution, but to emphasize that Krishnattam’s ‘popularity’ has to be situated within the social and literary context of the Zamorin court. Certainly, it was never meant ‘for the people’ in the tradition of Ramanattam (the forerunner of Kathakali), which was created in opposition to Krishnattam by the Kottarakara Tampuran, who strategically used Malayalam (instead of Sanskrit) for his attakathas, This choice of language was largely responsible for the widespread popularity of Kathakali, while Krishnattam remains a one-troupe theatre even today. So complete was the monopoly of Krishnattam by the Zamorin family that one would have expected this elitist control to result in an essentially exclusive art. Nothing could be further from the truth. Krishnattam is a great deal more accessible than Kathakali not only because it uses simpler gestures and dance patterns, but because it incorporates a wide range of ‘folk’ and lokadharmi elements. What needs to be asked is whether these elements were later additions to an essentially formal court entertainment. Was the attempt to incorporate them a means to ‘civilize the folk’? Or were these elements so dominant in the popular culture at large that they could no longer be ignored by the ruling class? Though there are no unequivocal answers to these questions, one can speculate with some justification that the extraordinary blending of elements in

182 RETURNING

Krishnattam evolved gradually over the centuries. Krishnattam should not be viewed as an entity ‘worked out’ by Manavedan or some mythical choreographer. Rather one should try to see the performance as an organic process which developed through an accretion of contributions from unknown gurus, actors, dancers, and—who knows?—perhaps the curtain-pullers as well. If Krishnattam has grown today, it is because it has always grown in the evolution of its history. In this context, I would now like to examine an extended sequence from Vividavadham in which I will try to highlight some moments of the performance in a larger socio-historical continuum. After the toddy-tapper leaves, we witness a striking example of how popular rituals have been integrated into the performance structure. Before starting to drink the toddy, Balaram performs an elaborate puja that is painstakingly detailed. First, he tears strips of bananaleaves and arranges them in a square pattern on the floor. He makes similar patterns for the two women alongside him (which seems to be an enormous waste of time because the women refuse to drink). Then only does he pour the toddy into a coconut cup and relish its taste. This ritual lasts for at least ten to fifteen minutes in which time all the other action stops. According to Pandit K.P. Narayan Pisharoti, Balaram performs the saktheya puja almost in compensation for the fact that he is drinking toddy. Normally, people are not expected to drink toddy, but if they perform a puja, then the toddy ceases to be alcohol and becomes a kind of prasad. Balaram seems perfectly aware of how a taboo can be sanctified through the performance of a ritual. However, this sanctity is summarily rejected by Vivida, the monkey-demon who appears later in the scene from behind a tree attached to one of the temple pillars. After amusing the audience with his simian tricks—he pinches one of the women (played by a boy), who promptly slaps his hand away from her breasts— Vivida surreptitiously steals the toddy-pot and proceeds to repeat the puja in direct imitation of Balaram. The effect is decidedly parodic, even though one could argue that it is in the nature of monkeys to imitate human actions. But this is a ritualistic action that goes on for ten minutes, painstakingly, outrageously. Performed by a monkey in his ‘Black Beard’ outfit, his tail trailing the foor, the puja acquires a farcical dimension, particularly when Vivida loses his patience and begins to pelt the audience with leaves. Gradually, his drinking of toddy begins to get increasingly coarse, even bestial. At one point, he spills the toddy on the floor and begins to lick it with his mouth. Of course, he has a mask on his face, but the sight is so unclean that some women spectators in the first row actually retreat from him. Whatever parody that Vivida might have conveyed about drinking leads to a ‘realistic’ demonstration of ‘what happens to a man when he gets drunk’. I strongly sense a social critique in the farcical savagery of the drunkenness, which may have developed at a time when social edicts against drinking were passed by various rulers. In his Social and Cultural History of Kerala, A. Sreedhara Menon mentions at least two sources in which drinking was regarded

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 183

as a social evil among the Nairs: Kunjan Nambiar’s Tullal poems of the late eighteenth century and Buchanan’s account of his travel in Malabar in the early nineteenth century. How and when this attitude to drinking entered Vivida’s performance in Krishnattam, we cannot say. The point to be emphasized is that there is not one Vivida in the performance history of Krishnattam, but many Vividas whose performances must have varied a great deal in their intensities and attitudes to social conditions. Performances, however circumscribed by their rules and choreography, change with the performers and spectators, and the times in which they live. Today, when Vivida gets increasingly drunk, it is interesting to note how the audience reaction changes from sympathy and amusement to a gradual distancing and disapproval. The children continue to laugh at Vivida, but even they become silent when the monkey-demon breaks the toddy-pot. It smashes before our eyes, creating a curiously ‘violent’ effect, not essentially different from the smashing of a bottle in a naturalistic production. Only here the ‘violence’ is inserted in a traditional performance, which serves only to enhance its power. Significantly, there is no laughter when Balaram proceeds to grapple with Vivida and strangle him to death. From this sequence, one can see the many levels on which the performance of Krishnattam can be read. All too often the lokadharmi sections in traditional Indian theatre are dismissed by the pundits as secondary to the rasa-ridden subtleties of natyadharmi. From my experience of Krishnattam, I have learned not to underestimate the dimensions and subtle levels of intensity in the so-called ‘realistic’ mode of acting. What needs to be qualified, of course, is that nothing in the traditional Indian theatre approximates ‘realism’ in the European tradition. The only sequence in Krishnattam where one senses that the gestures are ‘for real’ occurs during the last moment of the fight between Krishna, Balaram and the wrestlers. After a magnificent display of dance in the thandava style, where the moustachioed wrestlers fill the space with their enormous skirts and large whirling movements, there is a free-for-all, an exchange of blows and kicks. In the process, Krishna’s chutti is smashed to pulp, his skirt is ripped apart, and he really looks as if he has come out of a drunken brawl. His battered aharya is a visible consequence of ‘realistic’ acting. At the very other extreme, there is a kind of non-expressive, representational acting that one finds in children’s theatre. When Krishna and Balaram bring back Sandipani’s son from the realm of the dead, the young actor playing Sandipani with an enormous white beard expresses no emotion at all. He just indicates his approval with matter-of-fact gestures, and the scene ends with no embellishment whatsoever. Similarly, in a very brief scene lasting barely twenty seconds, in which Balaram marries the extremely tall Revathy, we see a young actor standing on top of a stool with a rather woebegone expression on his face. Balaram yanks him down, and together, they encircle the stage once and exit. Their marriage is solemnized.

184 RETURNING

In this simple, yet suggestive staging, one is unavoidably reminded of Brecht, though I am aware that this analogy would need to be qualified. I should also emphasize that the pilgrims watching Krishnattam would not have heard of Brecht. Risking an ‘impure’ reaction, I should point out that the very costume of Yavana, the foreign adversary of Krishna, is the clearest gestus that I have seen in any theatre. Dressed in a rather crumpled white tunic and turban, with a red sash complemented by a small red shield, Yavana radiates ‘foreignness’ through the very distinctness of his costume. Clearly, he is a mleccha, something of a barbarian, whose values and behaviour are visibly strange. Apart from his costume, Yavana conveys his ‘strangeness’ through a series of clumsy movements, which almost seem unrehearsed, diffident. He turns and stops, then turns again, jerking his head in different directions. Unquestionably, this ‘clumsiness’ is performed by a senior artist, it is superbly clear in its rendition. While Krishna stands absolutely still, Yavana fidgets around him nervously. Then he totally surprises us by slowly crouching behind Krishna and peering between his legs. This is almost as bizarre as his response to Krishna when he eventually starts fighting. While Krishna dances around the stage using militant hastas, Yavana walks. Walking and dancing embody two distinct energies. In their juxtaposition within the same scene, one confronts two totally different performance styles. But in other sequences, one can observe even more subtle differentiations within a single framework of action. In the confrontation between Krishna and Narakasura, for instance, there are five ‘characters’ on stage who portray their emotions through lokadharmi in five distinct ways. There is a moment when Krishna pretends to faint by sitting on a stool and leaning backwards. This ‘faint’ would be almost stylized if its artifice were not so obvious. Satyabhama falls to the ground and caresses Krishna’s knees with solicitous gestures. She expresses her concern more directly than Garuda, who stands on the other side of Krishna and fans him with one of his wings. The actor’s face remains expressionless, while his gesture alone conveys his emotion. Behind Krishna stands one of the pettikar, whose protruding belly serves as a pillow for Krishna’s reclining head. Involuntarily, this pettikar becomes an actor as he watches Garuda sardonically and even smirks at Satyabhama’s wifely concern. (This contrasts sharply with a later sequence in the play, when he casually walks in and around the actors, picking up Banasura’s wooden arms as they are systematically chopped by Krishna.) Surveying the quartet—Krishna, Satyabhama, Garuda and the pettikar —Narakasura ‘laughs’, using gestures of the shoulders. Then he raises his hands with mock despair. I believe that on some occasions he even feels Krishna’s pulse. In his ironic responses as an observer, Narakasura acts on a totally different level from the other ‘characters’ on stage. In this sequence, we see very clearly how many levels of lokadharmi can coexist on the same plane. Sometimes these levels are heightened through an astonishingly wide use of props, which help to concretize the different levels of reality. Some props can be literal, like the stick with which Yashoda beats

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 185

Krishna, but others can operate like signals. In the scene where Bhima vainly attempts to kill Jarasandha, Krishna quietly picks up a leaf from the floor and tears it in opposite directions, thereby providing Bhima with a concrete clue as to how Jarasandha can be killed. The beauty is that this leaf has been left behind from the previous scene with Vivida, who had torn branches from the trees and pelted the audience with leaves. Now the same leaves which were used ‘realistically’ by Vivida provide Krishna with an opportunity to demonstrate a signal. On another level, props can accentuate the ‘humanness’ of gestures, particularly those associated with Krishna’s childhood. When Vasudeva picks up the lotus-like end of his uttariya (upper cloth) and dangles it in front of the baby Krishna in his arms, he makes us forget that the ‘baby’ is a wooden prop, painted in electric blue. Similarly, when Devaki begins to stroke her pregnant belly as her labour pains begin, one is struck by the necessity of the gesture. The ‘belly’ is another prop attached to the costume, but the hands of Devaki caress the surface so suggestively that we almost feel the pains ourselves. It is through such details that Krishna’s birth gains an extraordinarily human dimension. One realizes yet another form of bhakti—Vatsalya, where God can be worshipped as a child, capable of being caressed and spanked. It is the child in Krishna who gives Krishnattam its naive wonder. One of the joys in watching the play is to see the numerous children among the pilgrims react to the action on stage. Some of their favourite ‘characters’ could be out of comic strips, for instance, Bakasura, the demon who is cast in the shape of a heron. His costume is an absolute joy: a woolly pink tunic with a long narrow neck, and a head-mask with a red comb and beak (that is manoeuvred through a string concealed within the costume). A particularly domestic touch to this fantastic costume is a row of buttons that attaches the pink tunic to painted wings. Bakasura’s aharya, if that is not too sophisticated a word for his outfit, seems to be inspired by the animal representations of the rural-based performances in Kerala. Krishna, on the other hand, is dressed with all the accoutrements of a pacha character. His ututhukettu, the heavy voluminous skirt worn over bundles of starched cloth, dilates on a horizontal plane, while Bakasura is comically constrained within a vertical shaft. With such totally distinct shapes, it is not surprising that their movements are altogether different. While Bakasura hops and squats on his hind legs, rather like a cormorant, then jerks his body and struts around in no particular pattern, Krishna encircles him with heroic gestures and vigorous movements. They do not seem to encounter each other at all, even though the narrative sung in the background describes how Bakasura gobbled Krishna up, then spat him out as though he had swallowed fire, then proceeded to peck him to pieces. None of these actions is depicted on stage, clearly indicating that the movements in Krishnattam do not illustrate the text. Rather, they suggest the text in their own way, providing occasional ‘shocks’ when the text and the movements coincide.

186 RETURNING

At the end of the scene, when the musicians utter the final lines in the padyageetham—‘Knowing him for the demon he was, you caught hold of his beaks, pulled them apart, and killed him easily’—we see Krishna standing behind Bakasura holding on to his beaks. The curtain is swiftly positioned in front of this freeze, then whipped aside almost immediately to reveal a black shape grovelling on the floor and yelping like a banshee. Before we have time to react, the curtain is drawn yet again, and once more whipped aside to reveal Krishna dancing triumphantly with two red beaks in his hand. From heron to demon to beak, the transformation takes place before our eyes like lightning. Manavedan may not have envisioned these fast cuts in his narrative, but they strongly suggest the origins of film in their ‘editing’ of action. A similar transformation, awesome in its impact, takes place when the deviously beautiful Lilitha is transformed into the ogress Puthana. When the scene begins, we see Lilitha standing directly behind a tiny model of baby Krishna placed on a stool. To the strains of Raga Nathamanakriya, she sings a lullaby, or rather, the musicians sing while she mimes the words with some basic abhinaya. ‘Balaka ma kuru ma kuru rodam/Mamakam-apiba kuchamoru modam.’ (Child, don’t cry, don’t cry. Drink milk from my breasts with delight.) As the song resonates with haunting lyricism, the curtain is raised behind Lilitha, forming a backdrop and also conveying the sense of an interior space. Now Lilitha squats on the floor and begins to feed the child. She plays the archetypal ‘good mother’, but the audience knows that she has smeared her breasts with poison. Suddenly, she begins to wince, then twitch, then gyrate and flail her body in different directions. She tries to rip the child from her breast, but it is stuck to her nipple. As her body begins to lunge in pain, the tala and raga change, gaining in intensity. ‘Muncha batha muncha batha kinchana kucham’ (Let go, let go of my breasts). So physical is Lilitha’s agony that the actor seems to be pushing his body against space in different directions. Then Lilitha falls and writhes, then rises and collapses again, bundling up in agony and smothering the voracious child at her breast. Abruptly, in a rapid movement, the actor leaves the performance area, and the diabolical Puthana looms from behind the curtain. This is a Kari character, entirely black, played by a senior actor with formidable energy. To emphasize the scale of the monster, a tiny figure of Krishna is tacked on to the breast-plate of the costume. It looks like a distended nipple. After announcing his presence with appropriate roars, the actor launches into a torrential dance with large, whirling movements and statuesque hand gestures. Now, the pain of Lilitha, so ‘realistic’ in its earth-bound movements, gains in aura and dimension as Puthana fills the space in a magnificent display of agony. Truly, when the actor falls on the ground in his voluminous skirt and cumbersome mask, he resembles a terrifying mound of black matter in which we can sense the final impact of the narrative: ‘She fell with bulging eyes, scattering trees, roaring like thunder, and with hands and feet outstretched, crushed trees with her weight’ Even though the

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 187

musicians’ voices cannot be heard over the clanging of the chengala and the drumming of the maddalam, the actor on stage has resonated the impossible death of Puthana with his total being and presence. He remains anonymous, rather like the authors of our ancient epics and poems. All we can assume is that the Puthana actor is a senior artist who has been with the company for a long time, and who has worked his way up from playing minor roles like the child Krishna and the gopis to major ones like Kamsa, Sudama and Yavana. What is refreshing to note is that the same role will be played by all the actors in the course of time. Moreover, there is such a strong emphasis in the choreography on the ensemble that almost all the roles are of equal significance. For Krishna, there are no small roles, only small actors. No play in the Krishnattam cycle is more harmonious in its ensemble than Rasakreeda. Gracefully endowed with lasya, an innately feminine grace, the play is an eloquent tribute to the inner longings and joy of the Gita Govinda. This is, perhaps, the only play where there is a sustained continuity of emotions, a gradual deepening of shringara: erotic bliss. Significantly, the curtain is not used to punctuate the scenes apart from the last one, where the demon Shankachuda is killed after attempting to abduct the gopis. For the rest of the play, there is no curtain because there is a continuum of time and space in the action - one night of love in and around the banks of the Jamuna. Not limited by the rectangular space of the thirassila, the performance space dilates and spills as it were into the temple space surrounding it. Rasakreeda is exposed, rather like the backs of the young dancers, who, towards the end of the night’s performance, losen their blouses to cool themselves. Strangely, the illusion of the performance is not disturbed when the gopis expose themselves as young men. The actors do this with a total lack of selfconsciousness. They are sweating profusely under their layers of clothing, it is only natural for them to open their blouses. As they wait for their turn to dance, we can see them hanging around behind the musicians. Some of them sip coffee, others yawn and lean against the temple pillars with those vacant expressions actors acquire backstage. Then, on cue, they gracefully line up, after hitching their skirts with male gestures, and lapse into lasya. Most of the characters are gopis, the eternal personifications of Madhura, the sweetest representation of divine love, where God is ‘our beloved, our husband’. Dressed in the minukku style, where there is no chutti to ‘dehumanize’ the face, the gopis radiate femininity. Their beauty spots and painted curls endow them with a filmi grace of a bygone era. Their breasts are particularly prominent, tacked on to the blouses and bunched up close and high. The very artifice of the breasts adds to the eroticism, particularly when the gopis finger the jewellery on their blouses. Overall, the purpose of the costume is to disguise maleness as much as possible. Suggestions of hairy legs and muscular arms, the hints of masculinity so necessary for Genet’s maids, are totally out of place here. These gopis are most true to Krishna when they look like women and when they make us feel that they are women.

188 RETURNING

Ironically, Radha is the most male presence on stage, perhaps more so than Krishna himself. She is played by an older actor, who has clearly developed a rather corpulent body: his rough double chin can be seen wobbling under his chutti. (Unlike the gopis, Radha distinguishes herself by wearing a facial border, not unlike Krishna.) Radha’s ‘femininity’ is conveyed less through disguise than by the formality of the actor’s gestures and responses to Krishna. Both of them seem to enjoy two of the most popular expressions in the repertoire of shringara: the purikam elakkuka, or the vibration of the eyebrows, followed by the pulakam kolluka, where the entire body seems to shiver with a frisson of delight. While these codes convey specific manifestations of joy, the interplay of Radha and Krishna is more ambivalent in other scenes, When they sit together on the floor, their heads touching each other, their legs interlocked, his hands on ‘her’ lap, ‘her’ hands on his thighs, one believes that they are Radha and Krishna, a god and a cowgirl. But what one sees contradicts what one believes. The divine couple is represented by two men locked in an intimate clinch. In this juxtaposition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ sensations, one confronts the central paradox that underlies any perception of Krishna. One can approach this god only as a woman. The ‘femininity’ of the male Radha in Krishnattam teases the male spectator into a questioning of his own sexuality as a preparation for Krishna. As Sudhir Kakar emphasizes in his essay on ‘Erotic Passion: the Secret Love of Radha and Krishna,’ Bhakti is preeminently feminine in its orientation, and the erotic love for Krishna is envisioned entirely from the woman’s viewpoint. The male devotees, saints, and poets must all adopt a feminine posture and persona to recreate Radha’s responses in themselves. (Kakar 1986, p. 82) And so it is with the male spectator of Krishnattam, who is just a part of an enormous pantheon of male lovers of Krishna who have projected their love specifically as women, either through a mental or a physical transformation. From saints like Chaitanya and Ramakrishna to poets like Sur Das and Nammalvar to the countless bhaktas of the Radhavallabhis, the Vailabhacharyas, Sakhibhavaks and the Sahajiyas, we can trace distinctly feminine responses and modes of behaviour, even physiological changes, in the male worship of Krishna. 5 It is not possible here to enter into the details of these personal ecstasies, but I will keep their history in mind as I enter another dimension of Radha, related to femininity and yet detached from it. Clearly, she is not entirely a woman. I can see myself in her. In her longings and separation from Krishna, I can participate, but not unconditionally. The women around me make me feel like a man, a voyeur of sorts. I notice that for this performance of Rasakreeda, unlike the other plays in the Krishnattamcycle, there are hardly any men in the temple. Just women and children. It seems as if it is for their gaze alone that Krishna is dancing.

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 189

Just when I am beginning to feel estranged, Radha enters the performance space and dances alone. It is scarcely a dance, resembling a series of desultory rotations in a slow circle, almost disembodied in effect. In the vast space of the temple, Radha appears to be lost in emptiness—an appropriate punishment for her jealousy and pride, but a cruel one, too. The actor expresses no emotion as his body continues to encircle the space almost of its own accord. Much of the time he has his back to the audience. Why then do we feel this separation of Radha so intensely? Each spectator/bhakta has to answer this question for himself/herself. But for me, Radha is neither man nor woman at this point in the performance—‘she’ is the jivatma, an individual soul in search of the Eternal. What provides ‘her’ seemingly aimless wandering with a centre is the vilakku, the lamp, that gains a tremendous resonance in this sequence. No longer an obligatory object with ritual significance, it becomes the centre of Radha’s dance that is performed in Guruvayur, the banks of the Jamuna, and the cosmos. In this absolute peace that the temple radiates at one in the morning, when most of the pilgrims are asleep, I begin to participate in another dance. It is the most celebrated piece of choreography in Krishnattam, and if I may presume to say, it may be the most beautiful dance in the world. The poochuttal, a garland dance, invites participation through its most basic steps, patterns of movement so pure that they draw you into the circle. A gently moving circle that, at first, does not rotate too much. It merely slides from side to side, then playfully breaks into formations of twos and threes, that begin to weave in and out to form fluid triangles, and then running lines of perpetual motion. Almost liquid in their meanderings, the curves of the dance distend into ellipses, particularly when the dancers move to different points on the circumference. But they always come back to the centre, which is represented by the vilakku that limits Radha’s wandering in space within a specific orbit. Though the same dance is performed in Avatharam and sections of it have been earlier performed in Rasakreeda itself, the dance in its entirety never fails to surprise the viewer. Blossoming like a flower, its patterns unfold like petals which are woven into a seemingly endless garland. Krishna’s contribution to this ‘garland’ is as fragrant as any of the other female dancers, but he adds his own piquance. As the circle is being shaped with increasing vividness, almost darkening in our presence, he occasionally leaps, igniting the symmetry with flashes of his presence. Gradually, the circle begins to glide, quietening down, like an ebb in the hectic round of love. It slows down even more gently, swaying from side to side. Then, for one moment, all the dancers kneel, then get up and perform a ‘signature’ with their feet, a sign that the dance has come to an end. They touch the floor and leave. I cannot imagine a more beautiful end. The dance ceases when it has to without any elaborate afterplay. In a city production of a ‘folk dance’, I can just see the dancers strategically timing their disappearance into the wings, in order to whip up the applause in the audience, There are no such tricks in Krishnattam.

190 RETURNING

When the gopis touch the sacred ground of their performance, they are seeking the blessings of Krishna, without whom there would be no dance. The faith of the gopis in Krishna is what constitutes the integrity of their performance. In Krishnattam, I have at last found a ‘theatre’ that answers my deepest questions of love. Through its concrete suggestions, I have come to realize that theatre itself is an act of love. To write about Krishna’s play is to acknowledge this love at some level or the other. One cannot hide behind rationality and scholarship, one has to open oneself to experience. It might seem fanciful, but the writer of Krishnattam has to be a gopi in spirit, a participant in a field of desire where there is a reciprocal play between lover and god, man and woman, spectator and actor. These roles are both distinct and interchangeable. The lover is also god, man can be a woman, and the spectator is an actor. Neither sahridaya nor bhakta, I am somewhere in between, a spectator who acts what he sees on stage. This action is not ‘real’ in a literal sense. Rather, it is part of that field of desire in which Krishna plays. One has to be tuned in order to listen to Krishna’s flute. Before I enter the temple, I have to prepare myself for the performance by observing some basic customs. I wear a dhoti, avoid eating meat and take a bath. I leave my emotional and intellectual baggage outside the temple along with my chappals. Then I circumambulate the sanctum on my way to the temple kitchen, where young Krishnas can be seen playing on the stairs leading to the greenroom. Not all of them will be performing Krishna tonight, they take it in turns to incarnate God. Inside the greenroom, the child Krishna is being made up. The chutti artist applies rice-paste and lime to his jawline. Dexterously, he sculpts the border, while the actor sits absolutely still. As time passes, one enters a rite of passage in which the actor ceases to be a child, and yet is not entirely a god. As a young friend applies the green paste to his chutti-lined face, elongates his eyes with collyrium and paints his lips red, the actor gradually loses his own face and an inner mask of Krishna appears, ancient and perpetually youthful The actor is most mysterious in this transition from face to mask. His liminality deepens as he puts on his costume, piece by piece. It is like watching god dress from his underclothes above, first the bundles of starched cloth, then the skirt and longsleeved jacket, followed by the numerous accessories including two artificial hands holding a discus and a shell. Finally, Lord Krishna is ready to make his appearance, but he has to wait for the fifth scene of Avatharam. Like a good actor, he sits on the stairs with his hands carefully placed on his sprawling skirt. His muti glints under the neon light which casts an eerie glow on his green face. One of his friends offers him a glass of coffee, but he declines with a slow wave of his hand. As I watch this god-on-the-stairs, he turns to me with a perfectly grave expression. Then his eyes twinkle and he smiles. Demurely, he looks down at his skirt and waits, preparing for Krishna.

PREPARING FOR KRISHNA 191

NOTES 1 It is significant in this regard that the taboo against speaking aloud does not prohibit the lower castes from learning Sanskrit. According to Sri L.S. Rajagopalan (personal correspondence), a knowledge of certain technical subjects can be acquired only through Sanskrit texts. The carpenter, the ayurvedic doctor, the astrologer, all have to learn a bit of Sanskrit. It is not uncommon for a Nair astrologer to quote profusely from Sanskrit verses while making predictions and assessing planetary positions. Even a carpenter (who is both untouchable and unapproachable) can quote Sanskrit slokas in connection with the building work or repair of a temple. In certain emergencies, he may even be permitted to enter the sanctum sanctorum. However, the priest is obliged to perform a purification ceremony after he leaves. These examples indicate a few exceptions to the rule which assumes that, while access to Sanskrit is permitted to the lower castes, they are prevented from speaking it aloud within the temple premises. 2 A few words about the use of Sanskrit terms in this essay. Wherever possible I have added a few explanatory notes in English. But in the case of complex terms like natyadharmi and lokadharmi, which are generally (and erroneously) translated as ‘stylized’ and ‘realistic’ modes of presentation, I believe it is necessary to keep the original Sanskrit terms without providing inaccurate English ‘synonyms’. In the course of this essay, which deals extensively with the lokadharmi conventions of Krishnattam, I hope it will become clear to the reader that lokadharmi is lokad harmi, not ‘realistic’ or ‘popular’, or ‘daily’ (as opposed to the ‘extra-daily’ representation of natyadharmi, which is ‘embellished’, ‘stylized’ and ‘formal’). The problem with technical words is their seeming neutrality in print. But in actual performance, what is ‘stylized’ in one culture may be ‘realistic’ in another, and vice versa. Therefore, it is imperative to situate these words in their individual performance contexts, and this can be done only when we see these performances in action. It is for this reason that I have preferred to describe Krishnattam rather than explain the performance through quotations from the Natyasastra. In the only complete translation of Bharata’s text in English, we read:

If a play depends on natural behaviour (in its characters) and is simple and not artificial, and has in its (plot) profession and activities of the people and has (simple acting and) no playful flourish of limbs and depends on men and women of different types, it is called Realistic [lokadharmi]. (Bharata 1950, XIV 62–3) I think it is very clear from this literal translation that words like ‘simple’, ‘artificial’, ‘natural’ are open to many meanings. They could just as well apply to lokadharmi as to nineteenth-century European realism. Only when these words are rooted in a specific performance context (necessarily culture-bound) do they convey a precise meaning and resonance.

192 RETURNING

3 All quotations from the narrative of Krishnattam are taken from the prose translation fo Krishnagithi by the late V.Subramaniam lyer. Though the translation (as yet unpublished) is literal and occasionally summarizes the padams and slokas in prose, it is the only available text of Krishnagithi in English. I am grateful to Sri L.S. Rajagopalan for reading sections of the original text in Sanskrit and in the authoritative Malayalam translation of Krishnagithi by Sri Elayath. 4 In his cogent presentation ‘Bhakti Versus Vibhakti’ at the Bhakti seminar organized by Dhvanyaloka, Mysore, in May 1987, Ayyappa Paniker elaborated on the ‘self-conscious’ and ‘learned’ poetics of Meppattur Narayana Bhattatiri, as opposed to the selfless, spontaneous lyricism of Poontanam. ‘For Meppattur, it seems as if bhakti comes as a result of conscious effort and prayer. He see the Lord “before him” (Agre pasyami), not within himself as Poontanam does.’ While the Narayaneeyam is written in the mahakavya tradition, Poontanam’s Jnanappana is just a pana or song, where God’s name is repeatedly invoked in the namasankirtana tradition with no show of erudition or false piety. 5 For a comprehensive summary of bhakti cults, focusing on ‘play’ and feminine modes of behaviour, read David Kinsley, The Divine Player: A Study of Krishna Lila, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, Chapter 4, ‘The Play of the Saints’.

REFERENCES Bharata (1950), Natyasastra, translated by Manmohan Ghosh, 2 vols, Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal. Eck, Diana (1981), Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Chambersburg, Penn.: Anima Books. Goswami, K. (1982) The Cult’, in Krishna: The Divine Lover, New Delhi: B. 1. Publications. Kakar, Sudhir (1986), ‘Erotic Passion: the Secret Love of Radha and Krishna’, in The Word and the World, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Kinsley, David (1979), The Divine Player: A Study of Krishna Lila, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas. Menon, A.Sreedhara (1944), A Survey of Kerala History, Madras: S.Viswanathan. —— (1979), Social and Cultural History of Kerala, New Delhi. —— (1987), Kerala History and its Makers, Trivandrum: St Joseph’s Press. Raja, Kunjunni ,(1964), Kuttiyattam, New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Academy. Vaidyanathan, K.R. (1981), Sri Krishna: The Lord of Guruvayur, Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan. Vatsyayan, Kapila, (1982), ‘Krishna in the Performing Arts’, Krishna: The Divine Lover, New Delhi: B.I.Publications. Vivekananda, Swami (1983), Bhaki Yoga, Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.

Chapter 11 Notes on the invention of tradition

Let me share some thoughts with you on that worn-out, inexhaustible subject— tradition. Instead of attempting to define it in a pan-Indian context, I would like to situate it within its multiple uses in the contemporary Indian theatre. To what extent has ‘tradition’ (which originates from the Latin word—tradere—to ‘hand over’ or ‘deliver’) been used in the context of ‘handing down knowledge’ or ‘passing on a doctrine?’ And to what extent has it been ‘invented’ (to use Eric Hobsbawm’s valuable term) in response to larger political, economic and social factors? As I demonstrate in this essay, tradition can be invented in any number of ways, even though we may not be aware of it. The most conspicuous of ‘inventions’ are ‘fabrications’, such as the Republic Day Parade, where the diverse cultures of India are ‘unified’ through a carefully choreographed spectacle. In recent years, this kind of ‘invention’ has become increasingly virtuosic as is evident in the Festivals of India and the Utsavs of New Delhi. Here, through a conglomeration of effects, which could include songs, dances, tableaux, symbols, floats, fireworks, informal minglings between ‘native’ performers and ‘foreign’ spectators, selling of Indian food and other ‘indigenous’ activities, an atmosphere is constructed whereby ‘the Indian tradition’ is affirmed, not necessarily as people in India would understand it, but as our government would like to represent it to the world. In this essay, I will not deal with this ubiquitous phenomenon but focus instead on the more seemingly ‘creative’ inventions of tradition that have been implemented by our own artists, directors and ‘experts’ in the Indian theatre. Much of the discussion will focus on the discourse of theatre, in which concepts of the ‘folk’ and the ‘theatre of roots’ will be examined as inventions of the urban intelligentsia. More often than not, when people ‘invent’ tradition (‘authentic’ or ‘spurious’, through acts of ‘cultural preservation’ or ‘subversion’), they unavoidably imply that they are no longer in touch with its immediacies. Yet an illusion is often maintained whereby the ‘invention’ is placed within the mainstream of tradition itself.

194 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

MEDIATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY At a very basic level, one could say that ‘inventions’ develop from an urge to ‘find out or produce something new’. They are not ‘discoveries’ of things which already exist but need to be ‘exposed’, ‘made known’. Inventions uphold a different sense of the unknown. Instead of ‘exposure’, they are concerned with making new artefacts. Very often, these artefacts emerge through the mediations of a new technology and machinery that precipitate an alteration of forms. In the following section let us examine some of these mediations through the intervention and assimilation of ‘foreign’ structures of representation. It is well known that our tradition has always provided us with a surfeit of narratives in the theatre. Our ‘professional theatre’ in the late nineteenth century scored some of its most spectacular successes with theatrical renderings from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. That all-Indian phenomenon, the Parsee theatre, funded and administered by the Parsees, but acted, directed, designed and most important, seen by a wide range of communities all over India, invariably had a stock of ‘traditional’ plays. Invariably, they were mythological in content, providing a direct stimulus to the religious blockbusters of the early Indian cinema. The point to be stressed here is that our ‘tradition’ had already been mediated by the colonial machinery of the nineteenth-century theatre, the conventions and stage tricks derived from the pantomimes and historical extravaganzas of the English Victorian stage. However, it should also be emphasized that these derivations had been thoroughly ‘Indianized’ through music, song, colour, pathos, melodrama and the histrionic delivery of lines that are intrinsically a part of the popular theatrical tradition in India. At a very elemental level, ‘tradition’ in the nineteenth-century commercial theatre meant ‘spectacle’. It provided audiences with new possibilities of adoring gods and mythological heroes in kinetic, technicolour settings. In its importation of theatre technology, there were trapdoors that facilitated supernatural ascents and descents, a ‘fly system’ that enabled apsaras to float rather precariously into the wings and, at a later stage, the novelties of the revolving stage, cloud machines and the cyclorama. So alluring were these derivations of an essentially foreign theatre tradition, and so widespread their influence, that even today one can trace their remnants in a number of ‘traditional’ performances. In Yakshagana, for instance, or of what remains of it, traces of the popular Gubbi theatre tradition still linger in painted backdrops and histrionic acting styles that are anathema to the purists. I have even seen a Krishnalila performance in a village where a very belligerent female impersonator upstaged Krishna in a sequinned costume and a wig that looked like relics from Shirin Farhad. At one level, these commercial interventions are ‘perversions’, but nonetheless, they have been absorbed within traditional performance structures in deference to ‘popular taste’. It needs to be emphasized that the clear-cut

RETURNING 195

distinctions between ‘popular culture’ (which is the category in which ‘company theatre’ or ‘Parsee theatre’ could be placed) and ‘folk culture’ (to which Yakshagana ostensibly belongs), cannot be regarded as absolute or mutually exclusive. Nor can we assume that it is ‘folk forms’ which invariably influence popular entertainment, because they happen to be older and ‘rooted’ in the cultural psyche of the people. Very often, it is the other way around, when, for example, the ‘perversions’ of commercial Bengali theatre, notably cabaret, have directly influenced the ‘folk’ theatre tradition of Jatra. In fact, if there is one ‘indigenous’ source of influence that has played a fertile role in promoting new genres, it would not be the ‘folk theatre’ (which is struggling to hold on to its identity), but the ‘company theatre’ tradition, which no longer exists, but whose idiom has been absorbed in the commercial Hindi cinema, and more recently, in the representation of myth on Doordarshan serials. If one had to trace the origins of mass appeal embedded in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana, one would have to turn to its use of Parsee theatre conventions, which are barely recognizable, yet perceptible, submerged under layers of conventions from other traditions. Apart from the obvious influence of mythological films, there are traces of science fiction, advertising, high tech, cartoons and even through some convoluted process of unconscious assimilation, the visuals of Monty Python. Whatever one may think of its artistic merits, one cannot deny that Sagar’s Ramayana has been sufficiently convincing to millions of people to serve as a source of darshan. What may seen bizarre and mindlessly eclectic has been intensely familiar to the masses. The eternal fiction of the Ramayana has not merely survived its ‘invention’ on the idiot box, it may even has stimulated a form of Hindu revivalism, whose manipulative possibilities by fundamentalists and politicians need not be stressed. One can despair about the absence of historicity in representations like Sagar’s Ramayana, but they also reveal very decisively that people are prepared to accept new ‘inventions’ of tradition so long as their faith in dominant myths is substantiated and enriched, In this regard, in reflecting on the mediation of new technologies to project myths, what needs to be stressed is not so much the technology itself, but how it is viewed. The Ramayana has been seen within the proscenium framework of the Parsee theatre tradition, which in turn has been miniaturized on the twodimensional rectangular television screen. It has also been seen for many years in numerous stagings of the Ramlila held in many parts of India, most notably in Ramnagar, where the lila extends over the entire town for a month. The fact that the Ramayana has survived its diverse ‘inventions’ testifies not only to the innate richness of the epic and its deep significance to most Indians, but it also reveals the phenomenal viewing capacities of the Indian spectators, who are capable of seeing the illusion of an image with or without its technological mediation. Sometimes, if they feel inclined, they may focus only on the technology, such as a ‘special effect’ in the Ramayana serial, and applaud its sheer virtuosity. But at

196 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

other moments, all that matters to them is the ‘vision’ that they alone see, which is precipitated by the representation, and yet detached from it. Darshan is capable of subverting technology. Even if an Indian spectator may not be fully conscious of his seeing capacities, there is nothing quite like his ability to see God within an actor’s frame. Nor can one underrate his capacity to tune in and out of an image. While avant-garde circles in America and Europe may cultivate the faculty of ‘selective inattention’, it seems to me that this comes very naturally to our spectators. Particularly in our rural and mofussil audiences, one finds an almost collective concentration and dispersal of energies. One moment could be totally rapt, as the spectators see a divine presence on stage. This could be followed by a very candid, and frequently, critical response to the representation on the level of pure theatricality. At still other moments, the play could be seen in a state of collective somnolence. But then, at just the appropriate moment in the narrative, everyone could be awake and totally absorbed in the action on stage. I dwell on this enormously flexible seeing process because it may be one of the contributing factors to our ‘invention’ of tradition. Certainly, it would be wrong to say that it is only ‘artists’ who are capable of invention. What seems more pertinent (though harder to substantiate) is that there is a collusion between the artist and the people regarding the nature and limits of invention. At this point in time, one can say that technology has not yet coopted the ‘visionary’ possibilities of seeing assumed by our spectators in their viewing of myths. But in time to come, as these performances get increasingly commodified and the onslaught of the media becomes more fierce, it will be critical to see how the viewing capacities of our spectators will be altered. Will they still be able to see what they choose to see and are willed to see, or will they be numbed into total passivity? Will the ‘inventions’ of tradition on the media create new myths, or will they simply reduce myth to the level of commercials? ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES Apart from the mediation of technology in determining ‘inventions’ of tradition, there are more practical matters that affect the changes in ‘traditional forms’. A year ago, I attended a Ramlila performance in the village of Amaur near Kanpur to find a permanent Ravana made out of stone. I could scarcely conceal my disappointment that the principle of burning the demon-god, so essential for the celebration of the lila, had been ignored for economic reasons. ‘It is too expensive to burn Ravana every year’, I was told. ‘After all, this is a small village, not Ramnagar.’ Only later did I realize that Ravana had been burned, but symbolically, through his headgear and weapon, which were made out of paper and wood. The rest of his body remained indomitably cast in stone, but nonetheless, he had already been ‘burned’. These paradoxes of faith reveal the acute consciousness of our people, both to everyday matters of survival and the endurance of faith. For them, it is not a

RETURNING 197

matter of ‘using’ tradition (as it is for us in the so-called contemporary theatre); it is a question of living tradition and making the necessary adjustments to keep it going. If a traditional performance dies, then maybe it was meant to, because it could no longer be sustained either economically or socially. About the worst attitude to tradition is to incarcerate it within an immutable form that ostensibly never changes. If tradition lives today, it is because it has always changed in the course of its history. How it changes within its own performative and cultural context is frequently undocumented and even forgotten, because the change occurs slowly, organically, in deference to the larger needs of its community. It is only in recent years through interventions like tourism, film documentation and interculturalism that the changes in ‘traditional’ performances have become at once more visible and swift. It could also be that we have developed a new awareness, a post-colonial consciousness, of what was previously taken for granted. In this context, I believe that one must differentiate between those changes which are intrinsic to growth of a traditional performance, and those which are imposed on it through external intervention, though I must acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between them. When I hear, for instance, of how a Theyyam performer has of his own accord incorporated a flashing electric bulb into his headgear to enhance his sense of the demoniac, this seems like a perfectly valid response to electricity, an intervention in the rural performer’s world. The change in the costume is intrinsic insofar as it comes from the performer’s response to his changing environment. On the other hand, can I deny that I am disturbed to see neon lights in a koothambalam, where, ideally, the koodiyattam performer should be watched in the glow of the vilakku, his eyes illuminated by the fire in the lamp? The problem with this use of electricity is that it does not seem to bother the performers themselves. It is my ‘aesthetic’ sense that is jarred, revealing my own ‘taste’ and cultural conditioning. Still more problematic is the transportation of a traditional performance from its own environment to a proscenium-bound, air-conditioned theatre in New Delhi or a mela in Paris. This environmental change alters the very context of the performance. In some extravaganzas, the performers are merely ‘slotted’ into a spectacle over which they have no control. Reduced to exotica, they resemble spots of colour without mind, body or soul. How does one accept these changes in performances resulting from altered environments? (1) In the case of the Theyyam performer, one cannot but appreciate the sheer ingenuity of the performer in incorporating a historical change (electricity) within the framework of his costume. Here one senses an organic relationship between the environment and the performer. (2) In the case of the neon lights in the koothambalam, one can accept these lights as useful even though they fail to enhance the energy of the performance. At best, one could say that the performer learns to accept them, and then forget

198 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

them, not unlike classical singers who have adjusted to the sound of the harmonium. In the long run, the use of ‘conveniences’ like neon lights and harmoniums is, perhaps, best accepted as a compromise—useful, but not particularly creative. (3) In the case of the altered environments provided by proscenium theatres and spectacles, it is difficult to accept their impositions on the choices of the performers. Inadequate exposure to these spaces, and more specifically, to the power relationships embodied in them, create an imbalance between what the performers are ready to give and what is expected of them from a foreign clientele. In such spaces, the performers invariably fail to represent themselves. Rather, they are represented by the environments themselves, and by all the values— political, social, commercial—embodied in them. This does not mean that traditional performers should not perform in these ‘alien’ spaces, but new mechanisms and relationships need to be explored whereby performers have more time and power to control their representations. INVENTING THE ‘FOLK’ Expertise plays an important role in determining categories in which ‘tradition’ can be placed. One such category is the ‘folk’, which received an official sanction at the First Drama Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1956. Inaugurated by Dr S.Radhakrishnan, who was then the Vice-President of India, the Seminar was part of a series that was intended to serve as a cultural counterpart to Nehru’s Five-Year Plans. The intention of the Akademi was to hold ‘one seminar every four years for each of the arts of dance, drama, music, and film’. Predictably, in the immediate wave of post-Independence nationalism, there was a definite drive among the participants to uphold the ‘Indianness’ of Indian culture. Some of our most prominent artists and cultural figures, including Mulk Raj Anand, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Balraj Sahni, Sombhu Mitra and V Raghavan, pondered a wide spectrum of immediate problems. They included the ownership of theatres, censorship laws, the Dramatic Performances Control Act, entertainment tax and almost as a secondary issue, the state of ‘folk drama’. One should remember that ‘folk theatre’ had not yet become fashionable and that the models of ‘professionalism’ in theatre continued to be European. Nonetheless, there was a fervent attempt in the Seminar to confront ‘traditional’ sources for the rejuvenation of our theatre. The most animated discussion in this regard was the one relating to bhavai, where the conflicting views of the participants reveal some of the deeply entrenched premises and problems underlying the urban construction and use of ‘folk theatre’ in India today. First of all, it becomes very clear from the discussion on bhavai (as from the Seminar in general) that the Indian theatre had already become regionalized, with ‘experts’ representing each state. The ‘folk drama’ as a category had also been

RETURNING 199

regionalized. No attempt was made in the Seminar to situate the concept of the ‘folk’ in a larger historical perspective—to see, for instance, how ‘folk forms’ became vehicles for contemporary political content during the IPTA days, thereby revealing the innate urban assumption that the ‘folk’ is not contemporary. Like a vessel, it has to be ‘filled’ with new ideas and political content. Instead of questioning such assumptions, the participants of the Seminar seemed to accept totally the validity of ‘folk drama’ as an adequate category in which to confront the specificities of rural cultures in India. Before proceeding with the discussion on bhavai, I believe it would be useful to reflect on the morphology of the term ‘folk’ in the Indian theatre. Since the participants in the Seminar did not question their use of this deceptively simple term, it is necessary for us to do so here. It is not clear when the term ‘folk’ entered the vocabulary of the Indian theatre worker. Certainly, it became popular during the IPTA movement when urban artists were compelled to discover their ‘roots’ in rural cultures. What needs to be emphasized is that the ‘folk’ has become an established category in the Indian theatre today. Actors and directors use it freely without questioning its obvious, yet diffused links to the word ‘people’. Nor is it assumed to be a ‘foreign’ word, any more so than ‘tradition’, which is used more readily than the Indian equivalents of parampara or sampradaya. Even in the academic world of folklore studies, it is significant that Indian equivalents for ‘folklore’ have been established only in recent years (Claus and Korom 1988, p. 32). The diffused use of the term ‘folk’ in Indian contexts could be related to the fact that our established culture refused to accept it as a respectable object of study. As late as 1932 the Indian folklorist, Sarat Chandra Roy, had lamented the fact that ‘folklore’ had not received the attention in India that ‘tradition’ was beginning to receive in discussions conducted by the Indian Science Congress, the Oriental Conference, and the Bombay Historical Congress (ibid., p. 31). Four years later, in 1936, when Dr Chelnat Achyutha Menon published Ballads of North Malabar, we are told that it was the first book of its kind in Kerala that ‘raised the subject in public estimation’ by ‘persuading’ the ‘educated Malyalee’ that folk studies had a ‘place in the cultural life of the country’ (Raghavan 1945, p. ii). In the context of the class and caste consciousness of the educated Indians, it is not surprising that the ‘folk’ were associated not just with ‘people’, but ‘common people’. Perhaps ‘peasant’ was one of the closest associations with the word ‘folk’ in its early history. Countering this history of prejudice, the IPTA movement glorified the ‘folk’ in the context of the freedom struggle. The ‘folk’ became emblematic of our ‘lost heritage’ and ‘authentic history’ that we were determined to reclaim from the British. Along with the patriotic aura surrounding the ‘folk’ in IPTA, there is also an inner tension underlying this word with specific reference to ‘people’. In the initial phase of the IPTA movement, when it was only too easy for artists with vastly different economic and political backgrounds to subsume their differences

200 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

under the immediate pressures and lure of patriotism, one could say that the ‘folk’ and the ‘people’ embraced each other’s needs. But there was also an unspoken assumption that it was the ‘folk’ who performed for the ‘people’, not the other way around. We don’t speak of the ‘folk’ watching a ‘people’s performance’, it is ‘people’ who watch a ‘folk performance’. Unavoidably, it was ‘people’ who were viewed in a more corporal light; they were ‘flesh-and-blood’ figures who constitute the ‘mass’. The ‘folk’, on the other hand, were inextricably linked to forms—burrakatha, tamasha, nautanki. Even today, I would argue that in the nebulous vocabulary of the Indian theatre artist, and his even vaguer social consciousness of his means of production, the ‘folk’ has been disembodied from the needs of the ‘people’. Quite literally, it has become a nomenclature for a wide range of supposedly non-urban performance traditions, that are primarily enjoyed by urban audiences. Significantly, for those IPTA artists with a more politically active ideology (inevitably Marxist), who favoured a realist intervention in the arts modelled on Bijon Bhattacharya’s Nabanna, it was the rhetoric of ‘the people’ that dominated over the ‘folk’. Not surprisingly, this group can be most strongly identified with the Bengal front of the IPTA movement. If it is not too much of a witticism, I should emphasize that after Independence, the ‘people’ stayed on in West Bengal, while the ‘folk’ eventually gravitated in the direction of New Delhi, which is the centre for all folk-related activities, including the handicrafts and the cottage industries. This is the centre where tradition is ‘invented’, ‘manufactured’, and ‘exported’ with an increasingly efficient and centralized system. It is also the centre where definitions of ‘Indian culture’ are made and disseminated. To return to the Drama seminar in New Delhi, one notes that ‘folk drama’ was defined not so much through an analysis of the term (which was taken for granted), but through a debate as to how one should intervene in ‘folk culture’. The underlying thrust of Dina Gandhi’s address on bhavai, which provided the source of the debate on ‘folk drama’, was not ‘Why should we intervene?’ but rather, ‘We must intervene now. How do we go about it?’ Part of the problem with her suggestions, as with most urban recommendations for the ‘folk arts’, is that she assumed an empathy with the folk artists, and then proceeded to represent them as if she were speaking on their behalf. In the process, her own use of these ‘folk forms’ became confused with their ‘indigenous’ state of being, which she lamented was in a state of decay, if not total extinction. From Gandhi’s address, it becomes obvious that her concern was not only for the ‘folk form’ and its ‘extraordinary life-force’, but for its artists, who were going to be ‘wiped off due to neglect, unemployment, and actual starvation’ (‘Discussion on Bhavai’, p. 114). Instead of confronting this crisis through active involvement, however, Gandhi recommended ‘researches and studies’ which could confirm that bhavai had ‘a definite contribution to make to our culture’ (ibid.). In retrospect, this priority given to research is problematic since it almost seems like a precondition before the bhavai artists can be ‘saved’. Gandhi seems

RETURNING 201

oblivious of the ironies involved in conflating the economic necessities of the bhavai performers with the need to develop their artistic potential. For her, the ‘sacred duty’ of ‘emancipating’ the folk artists could come about only through the organization of a research centre, a training school for the traditional performers, and a careful study of bhavai texts, so that ‘spurious interpolations can be eliminated’ (ibid.). Countering Gandhi’s advocacy of intervention, the extremely sophisticated and westernized Alkazi then spoke up in the Seminar for the people. ‘We want to educate the Bhavai artists’, he said. ‘But we do not for a moment consider that the nearer they reach us, the quicker would they discard the arts of their forefathers’ (ibid., p. 120). Then also, in response to the ‘so-called crudities and vulgarities’ entering the bhavai form, he asked: ‘Should we be so prude and puritanic as to evaluate every art in the light of our own moral code?’ (ibid., pp. 120–1). More prosaically, he affirmed that ‘we should not poke our noses in this affair because we do not really know what would exactly be good for this form and for its exponents’ (ibid., p. 121). The job should be left to anthropologists. Though, predictably, there was a resistance to this suggestion—an anthropological intervention is scarcely less ‘neutral’ than an artistic one—the debate between Gandhi and Alkazi does resonate even today, despite a sense of déjà vu. We have heard their positions before in other post-Independence contexts, and we continue to hear them even now. While Alkazi seemed to accept the inherent distance, culturally and socially, between the ‘urban’ and the ‘folk’ artist, thereby upholding his innate elitism, Gandhi wanted to bridge the gap in some meaningful way. Yet, this ‘bridging’ could scarcely be seen as altruistic. As Balraj Sahni pointed out, with reference to Gandhi’s production of Mena Gurjari, which ‘contemporized’ the folk form (notably by eliminating the male impersonation of women), these experiments in folk drama were a valuable source of growth for ‘our own [urban] theatre’. All Gandhi wanted to do, according to Sahni, was to ‘revitalize her own art’, and to retain as much of bhavai’s ‘indigenous’ qualities as ‘a sophisticated audience would be able to appreciate’ (ibid., p. 122). This is about the most honest statement that one could hope to find about the urban use of form forms. Let us acknowledge that this ‘use’ is more useful to the urban artist than to the ‘folk’ who inspired the creation. ‘Folk drama’ is essentially an urban construct that cannot claim to be entirely ‘indigenous’ (and therefore, ‘authentic’). It is a simulation of the ‘folk form’, sufficiently ‘indigenous’ (yet not entirely desi) to win the approval of urban audiences. The clientele of ‘folk drama’ is not the ‘folk’, but city people who need to be reminded of their ‘roots and native places’ from which they are irrevocably displaced.

202 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

YAKSHARANGA: A CASE STUDY Among the few inventions of performance traditions that have been acknowledged as ‘inventions’ rather than ‘reconstructions’, which have been specifically made with urban audiences in mind, one must include Shivaram Karanth’s creation of Yaksharanga. This can best be described as a balletic, ‘unified music-cum-dance form’, adapted from Yakshagana, the most popular traditional form of Karnataka. The impulse that led to the invention of this form and the cultural assumptions underlying it are worth examining in detail, even though Yaksharanga may not be particularly memorable in itself. Nor has it contributed to the rejuvenation of Yakshagana at large. Rather, it can be most accurately examined as an individual response to a particular tradition that Karanth himself would prefer to see as ‘a creative extension of the traditional form’ (Rea 1978, p. 59). However, as the very alteration of the word implies, Yaksharanga is not an organic development of Yakshagana. Karanth has selected those aspects of the tradition that are most meaningful to him, to which he has added his own contributions and manipulations. In his experiment, one realizes the validity of Raymond Williams’s acute observation about ‘tradition’, namely that it represents ‘a selection and reselection of those significant received and recovered elements of the past which represent not a necessary but a desired continuity’ (Williams 1981, p. 187). One could say that Karanth’s Yaksharanga is the manifestation of his ‘desire’ to see Yakshagana within the contours of his vision. However, when he first started his research, it was neither arbitrary nor entirely subjective. He needed to authenticate the history of Yakshagana before extending or deviating from its principles. His passionate search for old manuscripts and prasangas (narratives), meetings with gurus and musicians, eventually culminated in a seminal thesis on Bayalata, which literally means ‘open-air plays’, and which serves as a nomenclature for a wide range of forms relating to Yakshagana. Through his study, Karanth was able to contribute important perspectives on raga, tala, costumes and stagecraft. But this expertise did not compel him to ‘reconstruct’ Yakshagana in an antiquarian mode. Rather, it stimulated him to find points of departure for the performance of Yakshagana as he envisioned it in our world today. This impulse to confront tradition in order to concretize a personal vision is a rarity in the contemporary Indian theatre. One may not agree with Karanth’s choices, but one cannot deny the intensity of his convictions. At a time when tradition is generally regarded with diffidence or the most abject deference, it is heartening to hear the ‘rebellious’ voice of an octogenarian. To me, tradition is no dead corpse, merely to be worshipped for its own sake. Like language, it has to acquire, when necessary, new words and new meanings, while many old words will naturally be lost… For any change to

RETURNING 203

be valid, its nature has to be relevant to its content. Form and content go together. Yakshagana is no exception. It was by redefining the ‘content’ of Yakshagana that Karanth was compelled to make some of his most controversial changes. Significantly, he did not merely locate this ‘content’ in the prasangas sung by the bhagavata (‘the first person’), but in the ‘rhythmic content’ embedded in Yakshagana’s intricate footwork and ‘walks’. His purpose was to find appropriate links between the ‘emotional content’ of vacika (speech) and the ‘rhythmic content’ of angika (movement), which are normally kept apart. Any element that interfered with this ‘unifying’ impulse was summarily discarded. In order to ensure ‘a harmonious aesthetic experience’, Karanth made one of his most radical and controversial choices: he eliminated the improvized dialogues between the actors, which may be one of the most popular elements in ‘traditional’ performances of Yakshagana today. Karanth felt that the transition from music to prose created an ‘unbridgeable gap’, resulting in ‘dissonance, disharmony, non-art’ (Rea 1978, p. 60). Though this perception is precise, its assumptions are questionable. Certainly, there is a break when the bhagavata’s third-person narrative is interrupted by the first-person exchanges between the actors. But this ‘dissonance’, this shift in voices, one could argue, is what gives Yakshagana its theatrical immediacy, its jolting momentum. Nor is it entirely accurate to say that the narrative and the dialogue ‘duplicate’ each other. Apart from the significant differences in utterance of the bhagavata and the actors, the latter elaborate on the details in the prasanga in response to the immediate performance situation. Of course, this element of improvization (intrinsic to all ‘folk traditions) is precisely what Karanth distrusts. He finds the verbosity of the actors ‘tasteless’ and ‘monotonous’. What is perhaps at stake in his disapproval of the actor’s license is that he, as a director, can have no control over it. It is obvious that despite his reinstatement of the bhagavata (who traditionally functions as a ‘director’ during the performance itself), Karanth is not prepared to relinquish his own power as a director, both onstage and during the rehearsals. In this regard, it is well known that he directs in the ‘tyrannical’ tradition, kicking and slapping his actors if they fail to match his energy. Though his personal limitations as a dancer and confusion of tala are also well known, no one has the guts to question his pedagogy. Besides, his passion for the art is strong and infectious, and most artists have no choice but to submit to it. What would have happened, however, if Karanth’s energies could have been matched by legendary artists like Sreni Gopalakrishna Bhatt? It appears that during one performance while playing Ravana, Bhatt interrupted the Bhagavata on his very first question—‘Are you justified in abducting Sita?’—and spent the entire night justifying Ravana’s act with the most sophisticated legal casuistry (Kambar n.d., p. 3). Surely, the elimination of this vocal tour de force in favour of ‘aesthetic harmony’ would have been a loss.

204 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

One is compelled to question whether ‘harmony’ is an adequate compensation for the rough and immediate communication that takes place between actors and spectators during the dialogues. Instead of exposing the ‘joints’ of Yakshagana, risking the possibilities of interruption from the audience, Karanth settled for seamlessness in the good, old-fashioned tradition of bourgeois art. In this structure of representation, everything works out as planned because there are no risks. The director provides ‘harmony’ on all levels of the production. The actors are free only within his constraints. Apart from his own directorial constraints, to which he seems oblivious, Karanth accepts the limits of the proscenium theatre. He also endorses the cultural association of such spaces, which determine (among other factors) the duration of a performance. Instead of an all-night, open-air, tent performance of Yakshagana, where the performance is just a part of many other activities including eating, gossiping, chewing paan and sleeping, Karanth accepts that a three-hour, proscenium presentation of Yaksharanga is perfectly adequate for an appreciation of its subtleties. His purpose is to produce neither an ‘authentic’ Yakshagana nor a ‘tourist show’, but a well-made ballet that is tightly coordinated, accessible and eminently exportable. In this context, one cannot deny that Karanth’s structural changes in Yakshagana have been made with foreign audiences in mind. For instance, the high pitch of the bhagavata’s songs has been lowered so that it is now more congenial to western ears. The inclusion of a saxophone and a violin has also enhanced the overall ‘harmony’ of the musical score. In addition, of course, the dialogue has been eliminated, thereby removing the possibility of alienating nonKannada speaking audiences. Ironically, there has been a counter-move to Karanth’s changes by Martha Ashton, the American ‘expert’ on Yakshagana, who has favoured a more ‘traditional’ representation of the performing art with all its accessories and dialogue. At one level, she is more ‘authentic’ than Karanth, though her knowledge of Yakshagana is derivative. Her awareness of Kannada culture cannot be compared to Karanth’s prodigious knowlege of his state, which encompasses not just the arts and literature but geology, botany, architecture and science as well. Yet, Ashton has become the ‘authentic’ representative of Yakshagana abroad while Karanth remains something of an ‘anti-traditionalist’ in his own home. At this point, I should emphasize that the essential limitation of Yaksharanga does not lie in its apparent ‘inauthenticity’, but in its construction and acceptance of an aesthetic that invites passive consumption. Like other urban reenvisionings of ‘folk forms’, Karanth’s experiment seems to have diluted rather than strengthened the energies of the ‘folk’. It is particularly sad in this regard that no one has challenged Karanth’s work through another experiment. One should accept that all experiments with traditional forms are necessarily partial and incomplete. They need to be questioned and extended by other artists, not through polemics or ‘reform’, but through further explorations that continue

RETURNING 205

where the first experiment left off. Our tragedy in India is not that there are iconoclasts like Karanth who ‘do what they want’ in accordance to the inner necessities of their vision, but that there are not more people like him, who can ‘invent’ tradition with a consciousness rooted in the immediacies of their lives. Instead of generating more experiments, however, Yaksharanga has merely bureaucratized its practice through numerous tours and official performances that have been advertised with all the hype one associates with our burgeoning cultural trade. This bureaucratization has been masterminded by Haridas Bhatt, who has a formidable talent (by Indian standards) to promote the performing arts through printed matter—booklets, brochures, leaflets with catchy captions like ‘Yakshagana goes to Japan’, ‘Bon Voyage from Chief Minister’ and ‘Pride of Karnataka’. To highlight some of the assumptions underlying Bhatt’s salesmanship, a quote from one of his articles will do. During the years 1975–78, the Yakshagana gave nearly 155 performances in six states of India—right from Meghalaya to the southern most Tamilnad and thrilled thousands of enlightened art-lovers. A French artist after observing the Naladamayanthi of Yakshagana opined that this was the very best variety of contemporary dance-drama forms of India. The national dailies of Bombay and Madras wrote in no uncertain terms about the artistic superiority of the form. Scholars who have known the secrets of the world theatre forms declare that Karanth’s creation can certainly place Yakshagana in a still more elevated position in world theatre. As I was in charge of managing ‘Yaksharanga’ in its tours of other states of India and abroad, I have seen the impact that this theatre form makes on audiences everywhere. Unlike other classical dance-drama styles this folk form (which is also semi-classical) is verily the theater for all. (Bhatt n.d., p. 9) Unavoidably, one is struck by Bhatt’s need to confirm Yakshagana’s worth through foreign endorsements and standards of ‘world theatre’. Also to be noted is his scarcely concealed chauvinism in asserting Yakshagana’s ‘artistic superiority’ over other traditional forms in India. As for Yaksharanga, it is the ‘theatre for all’. While criticizing Bhatt’s reduction of art to public relations, one should also acknowledge that the very accessibility of Yaksharanga has lent itself to a process of commodification. The sad reality, however, is that there was much thought and passion in Karanth’s experiment that has failed to resist commercial pressures. Once again, bureaucracy has proved to be stronger than art. And consequently, Yasksharanga has no alternative but to petrify into another ‘form’, without inspiring any significant change either in Yakshagana itself or the use of ‘folk forms’ in the Indian theatre today.

206 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

THE THEATRE OF ROOTS Despite its limitations, Yaksharanga is at least an intelligible form related to a traditional performance. In contrast, most experiments of ‘tradition’ in the contemporary Indian theatre have merely borrowed a stock of techniques and conventions, which have been recycled in a rather facile and decorative manner. Though many of our ‘tradition-inspired’ and ‘folk’ productions have been entertaining and visually pleasing, they have totally failed, in my view, to contextualize their borrowings in a responsible manner. Nonetheless, they have gained a tremendous respectability and official recognition over the years. In fact, they have even been formally categorized by Suresh Awasthi, one of their most ardent supporters, as belonging to the ‘theatre of roots’, in which he includes our most established artists like Habib Tanvir, B.V. Karanth, Ratan Thiyam, K.N.Pannikkar and younger directors like M. Ramaswamy and Kartick Awasthi. It would not be irrelevant to exmaine how this ‘tradition-inspired’ theatre corresponds to the rise and fall of Awasthi as an important cultural official in New Delhi. In fact, he charts his own role in the development of this theatre in his rather simplistic ‘Defence of the Theatre of Roots’ in a special issue on the subject published by Sangeet Natak (Awasthi 1985). Significantly, during the First Drama Seminar (which I discussed earlier), where Awasthi had presented a paper on folk forms in the Hindi-speaking region, he had not been particularly vociferous. This was the period shortly before Alkazi had taken over as Director of the National School of Drama, where the Indian theatre would have to be ‘professionalized’ (in the tradition of RADA) before it could become ‘indigenous’. Even in 1961, when Awasthi had organized a national seminar on ‘Contemporary Playwriting and Play Production’ as the General Secretary of the Bharatiya Natya Sangha, he claims in his ‘Defence’ that he was dubbed a ‘revivalist’ for promoting ideas relating to the ‘relevance’ of traditional forms. Between 1965 and 1975, however, when Awasthi served as the General Secretary of the more prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi, he had more power to organize performances, festivals, seminars and exhibitions, primarily in New Delhi. A notable meeting was the ‘National Roundtable on Contemporary Relevance of Traditional Theatre’ in 1971, by which time the so-called ‘new theatre’ had already established ‘greater confidence and vigour’ (Awasthi 1985, p. 87). Perhaps this was the heyday of both the ‘theatre of roots’ and Awasthi’s career, which has involved the dissemination of ‘traditional Indian theatre’ to farflung countries like Japan, Greece and the United States. Today, however, after his brief tenure as the Chairman of the National School of Drama and his removal from the limelight as it were, the ‘theatre of roots’ has acquired the status of a rather tired slogan commemorating a ‘movement’ that has come full circle.

RETURNING 207

From Awasthi’s ‘Defence’, it become clear that he thinks about ‘tradition’ through dichotomies and the most generalized categories. Invariably, the ‘theatre of roots’ is set up against the ‘Western realistic theatre’, which forms part of our ‘decadent’ cultural inheritance. By turning to our ‘roots’, it appears that our artists have been able to ‘reverse the colonial course of contemporary theatre and put it back on the track of the great Natyasastra tradition’ (ibid., p. 85). The fact that ‘realism’ might have inspired Indian narratives, histrionics and performance structures, as in the vibrant and profoundly Indian ‘company theatre’ traditions to be found all over the country, is a reality that Awasthi does not seem to consider. What matters is to establish a direct line with the Natyasastra itself. Only then, or so Awasthi implies is it possible to be authentically Indian. ‘Is there an authentic Indian tradition?’: this most pertinent question is raised by Anuradha Kapur in her study of the Ramlila. For Kapur, ‘authenticity’ is a category of thought intrinsically linked to post-colonial preoccupations with ‘identity’ and ‘roots’, which are themselves constrained within the polarities of East and West (Kapur 1988, p. 5). By setting up our tradition as ‘true’ against the encroachments of a ‘foreign’ culture, we ‘manufacture’ a history of tradition that is ‘basically moulded by the West insofar as it is posited as its exact alterity’ (ibid., p. 6). Rather like the orientalists of Europe who saw mythical points of origin in the languages and philosophies of the ‘distant East’, we too ‘orientalize’ our past by refusing to confront the mutations of our history. We prefer the mythical sanction of the Natyasastra to an examination of the contradictions, details and interpenetrations of our multilingual, multicultural society. One searches in vain for some self-questioning in Awasthi’s ‘Defence’, only to confront generalities. We are told, for instance, that one of the distinguishing features of the ‘theatre of roots’ concerns the ‘rejection of the proscenium’. Apart from padding this section with totally gratuitous references to Badal Sircar and E.Alkazi, who most emphatically do not belong to this tradition, Awasthi includes his two primary representatives, K.N.Pannikkar and Ratan Thiyam, who have not worked in predominantly non-proscenium conditions. Where are the theatres in India to support these conditions? Thiyam’s theatre, I would say, has been strongly influenced, if not constrained, by his exposure to the proscenium theatre, as represented to him by his mentor, Alkazi, at the National School of Drama. His framing of action, timing of exits and entrances, lateral groupings, use of the cyclorama and above all, his tacit refusal to confront the audience with breaks in the narrative or direct addresses—these are conventions that strongly uphold the illusion of the ‘fourth wall’. When Thiyam had worked outside of the prosceniurn, it has been for ‘nontraditional plays like Imphal Imphal, which has been structured on the lines of Sircar’s Third Theatre. Neither Pannikkar nor Thiyam, to my mind, has found ways of altering the angles of perception from which their productions have to be viewed, and therefore, Awasthi’s superficial allusions to traditional practices like pradakshina (circumambulation of the temple) are totally out of context. So also

208 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

are his references to the interminglings of the ‘performance space’ and the ‘audience space’, which belong to the environments of the Ramlila rather than to the proscenium-bound spectacle of the ‘theatre of roots’, where the seats and the stage are ‘rooted’ to the ground. The second generalization that distinguishes (or rather obfuscates) the ‘theatre of roots’ is ‘stylization’. Without attempting to define this most nebulous of terms, Awasthi claims that it has brought about a ‘revolutionary change’ in the art of the actor and the transformation of the ‘dramatic text’ into the ‘performance text’. In contrast to ‘realistic theatre’, the impact of staging signs in the ‘stylized theatre’ is ‘maximized and their number multiplied’ (Awasthi 1985, p. 89). It doesn’t help to be told that the ‘plasticity’ of stylization is to be found not only in Koodiyattam and Kathakali, but in ‘the Ajanata murals and the sculptural tradition’ as well (ibid., p. 92) (‘sculptural tradition’? Of what?). As if these panIndian, interdisciplinary references were not enough, Awasthi includes panAsian references to Noh and Kabuki to enhance the authenticity of his ‘theatre of roots’. One tires of Awasthi’s interminable capacity to list ‘traditional’ elements like half-curtains, headdresses, ‘stirring’ exits and entrances that reduce ‘the Natyasastra tradition’ to a pitiful parody. How, for instance, does it help to be told that Panikkar uses the ‘sing-song delivery of Koodiyattam’ or that he ‘follows traditional theatre and Natyasastra prescription’ by making Bhima and Ghatotkacha enter to the accompaniment of drums? (ibid., p. 97). Or that Ramaswamy’s chorus in Antigone danced ‘beautifully’ because the movements of the traditional dancers were based on the ritual dance Devarattam? I mean: why Devarattam? Surely there must be some link between the inner energy of Devarattam’s movements that illuminates the text of Antigone in some specific way. We cannot simply turn to ‘traditional forms’ because of their ‘beauty’ or ‘stylization’ or ‘sculpturesque quality’. What do they mean to us? This mindless simplification of ‘forms’ has been shaped and endorsed by the official sanction given to the decontextualization of tradition in our theatre today. If institutions like the Sangeet Natak Akademi were less interested in ‘forms’ and more concerned about the historical impulses and mutations underlying these forms, our young generation of theatre people would not be so lost. And yet, how can one blame them if the most illustrious representatives of ‘tradition’ in contemporary theatre fail to question their own simplicities? Even in the productions of Thiyam and Panikkar, in whose craftsmanship there is much to admire, I, for one, am left hungering for content, for some link to our world that accentuates the turmoil and contradiction, the pain that these very artists must have suffered as ‘tradition-inspired’ Indians, who are nonetheless alive in Rajiv Gandhi’s India. Strangely enough, it is in traditional performances that one is more likely to find this link than in the so-called contemporary productions of the ‘theatre of roots’. When I see Abhimanyu in a Theru-k-koothu performance flogged to death with a handkerchief—each flick resulting in a dismembering of his limbs—

RETURNING 209

juxtaposed with elegiac refrains in which the world mourns for his untimely death, I am strangely alerted to the banality of violence in our everyday lives. Perhaps, this is an ‘impure’ reaction, but it feels more valid to me than the passivity I succumb to while watching Abhimanyu die in Thiyam’s production of Chakravyuha. Here in this picture-frame, where grief is so beautifully modulated, I am left unconvinced by the representation. What resonates is the craft of the proscenium tradition dressed with the trappings of ethnicity. Obviously, our Abhimanyu cannot be the crude, farcical genius of a performer in Theru-k-koothu, whose very form embodies the mythical reality of the character. We need to create our own forms for Abhimanyu today in accordance to our perception of what he means to us today. We can do this not by imitating traditional performances or seeking a false lineage with the past, but rather, by confronting the tradition in us that has been dislocated, fractured, reassembled and transformed through layers and dissimulations of our history. We need to reject the easy inheritance implied through categories like the ‘theatre of roots’, and accept Eliot’s stern (yet curiously valid) advice that tradition can be obtained only through ‘great labour’. This involves a cultivation of the ‘historical sense’, which provides ‘a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ (Eliot 1969, p. 49). This ‘presence’ must live in the indissolubility of form and content in our theatrical representations, which today is merely assumed, without being fully suffered or questioned. To our ‘traditional theatre’, we must pay respect, not to sentimentalize its ‘secrets’ or out of false reverence, but to acknowledge that it has already absorbed our future in its presence. For us, I believe, it is not a question of returning to tradition, but rather, of catching up with its immediacies, incarnated through eternal, ever-changing truths. BEGINNINGS There are two images from our mythological tradition that seem relevant to this discussion, or rather, my need to intervene in its history. At one level, the images are quite unrelated, separated by narrative and time—one is from the Mahabharata, the other from the Punjabi legend of Puran Bhagat. And yet, at a subterranean level, these images are united through their advocacy of what I must call ‘violence’. Today, we could do with some of this ‘violence’ in our suffocatingly safe theatre. In the Mahabharata, there is that memorable moment when Yudhisthira receives permission from Bhishma to kill him. The ‘father’ legitimizes his own death at the hands of his ‘son’. Violence receives a paternalistic, if not divine sanction. It is now Yudhisthira’s dharma to kill Bhishma. There is a different kind of violence in the story of Puran Bhagat, which does not involve killing, but rather, a rejection of the father and whatever he represents —family, kingdom, state, authority, love. After being incarcerated in a dungeon for the first twelve years of his life, then exiled, and later imprisoned, Puran

210 NOTES ON THE INVENTION OF TRADITION

Bhagat goes through many trials and humiliations before he acquires the selfrealization of a yogi. In the final episode, when his father begs him to take over the kingdom, Puran rejects the offer: ‘If you cannot govern your kingdom, let it go to the dogs…. I will have none of you and your belongings. I am a yogi. I must go’ (Gill 1986, p. 146). And he leaves without any attempt to reconcile differences or to affirm traditional ties. In Puran’s exit, one finds a paradigm of rejection. I do not believe that there is a single artist in the Indian theatre today who is prepared to ‘reject’ tradition as resolutely as Puran turns away from his father and inheritance. Perhaps, this is a totally unfair demand on my part. Maybe our artists are still too close to ‘tradition’ (or whatever they make of it) to dissociate themselves from its hold in order to pursue their own journeys in theatre. At the same time, they do not believe that they have the right to ‘kill’ tradition with as much respect and fervour as Yudhisthira kills Bhishma. Perhaps, they have not yet received the inner sanction to fulfil this necessary task. It is safer, therefore, for them to fold their hands and deify tradition, perpetuating deference and cowardice. Unable to ‘reject’ or ‘kill’ (which, in artistic terms, would involve a subversion of the ‘traditional form’), our theatre artists remain in limbo. They don’t know how to free themselves from tradition or live with it without compromising on their own truth. In the meantime, they ‘invent’ tradition not so much from an inner necessity, but in deference to larger cultural and political factors that favour a sanctification or dressing-up of the past. It is time to end this facile use of our tradition. Instead of bothering with the minutiae of hand-held curtains, masks, make-believe poorvarangas, and stirring exits and entrances to throbbing drums, we need to ask ourselves some crucial questions: What is our sacrifice in theatre today? Who are we performing for in the absence of gods? How can we transform ourselves through theatre? What are we celebrating on stage? I ask these questions not because I have the answers, but because they seem necessary to begin a confrontation with tradition that could transcend its ‘inventions’ in our theatre today. REFERENCES Awasthi, Suresh (1985), ‘In Defence of the “Theatre of Roots”’, Sangeet Natak, Nos. 77– 8. Claus, Peter and Korom, Frank (1988), ‘Folk, Folklore, and Folkoristics’, Folkoristics and Indian Folklore, Hayward: WRC Consulting, April 1988. Bhatt, Haridasa (n.d.), ‘Theatre for all—Folk Performing Arts of Karnataka’, typewritten manuscript. Eliot, T.S. (1969), ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

RETURNING 211

Gill, Harjeet Singh (1986), ‘The Human Condition in Puran Bhagat’, The Word and the World, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Kambar, Chandrasekhar (n.d.), ‘Yakshagana As I See’, typewritten manuscript. Kapur, Anuradha (1988), ‘Thinking about Tradition: The Ramlila at Ramnagar’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 16. Raghavan, M.D. (1945), Folk Plays and Dances of Kerala, Trichur: Mangalodyam Press. Rea, Kenneth (1978), ‘The Tradition and the Innovation’, in Theatre in India: The Old and the New, Theatre Quarterly, Vol. VIII, No. 31, Autumn 1978. Williams, Raymond (1981), Culture, Glasgow: Fontana Press. —— (1985), Keywords, London: Flamingo Books.

All references to the First Drama Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, including ‘Discussion on Bhavai’ are taken from a printed documentation of the entire Seminar, which unfortunately does not identify either the publisher or the date of publication.

212

Chapter 12 Letter to an actress

Dear Alak: Forgive me for not writing a review of The Human Voice and Kunti, but I thought it would be more useful to write you a letter. The problem with reviews is that they limit you to what you see on stage. A letter, on the other hand, can dwell on more intimate matters relating to the process of acting itself. In your intensely private rehearsals, which I was privileged to watch and question, I saw you grope towards a new idiom of acting, specifically rooted in the Indian psyche, and yet exposed to diverse influences and tensions. Rarely have I experienced a more meaningful collision of distinct cultures. In the very juxtaposition of your plays, I was made to confront two psyches, two dramaturgies, two languages, two histories, all joined through one person, one being on stage. Can I deny that this collision of Kunti and Cocteau jarred me into a realization of my own cultural tensions, my post-colonial dilemma? Like you, I need Kunti as much as I am drawn to Cocteau. The agony is whether they can live together. In your performance, they did, radiantly, though not without considerable pain. Allow me to be your critical alter ego as I relive your process of acting with you. But before we do this, let us reflect briefly on the intercultural panorama surrounding your evening of monologues—Kunti in Hindi, The Human Voice in English. You, a Marathi Indian actress, trained at RADA, living in Bahrain with your French husband, check the French consulate library for a copy of The Human Voice. It isn’t available. But later in the year, when you are in Kerala directing Edward Bond’s The Bundle, Sankara Piliai hands you his translation of Cocteau’s play in Malayalam. You eventually read the original text in French and translate it into English. But now you need another play about a different kind of woman, an Indian, who can counterpoint the rather tortured character in The Human Voice, who spends the entire play on the phone talking to her husband from whom she is separated. Once again, Sankara Pillai comes to the rescue and creates Kunti for you, that monolithic figure from the Mahabharata, mother of the Pandavas, who remains hard and resilient till the very end. Now, with Kunti and The Human Voice, you approach Kumar Shahani, one of the finest film directors in India, who has been trained by Ritwik Ghatak and Robert Bresson, and somehow cajole him into directing both plays.

214 RETURNING

Where else but in India would it be possible to encounter this exhilarating, if contradictory, frame of reference? Who except a group of pre-Independence, western-educated Indian artists would have access to both the Natyasastra and the Poetics, the films of Ghatak and Bresson, the Mahabharata and Cocteau? I think you will agree with me that this access to ‘the best that has been thought and said’ in the East and West is not entirely a privilege. More often than not, it is a painful burden, a source of confusion. One can be numbed into silence by one’s intercultural tensions. And yet, if one is in a position to explode these tensions, this could result in some unusually creative work. I can never forget my shock when I entered the rehearsal one day (at the Institute of Soviet Culture in Bombay) to hear you performing The Human Voice in English. For some reason I had imagined that you would be doing the play in Hindi. But there you were speaking in English, our English, not touched up with those ridiculous British accents that our English-theatre amateur actors cultivate. Your English was real because it came from your being Indian. I can understand how you felt when you had to switch to Hindi for Kunti. Here you took great pains to cover the Marathi inflections in your voice so that the ‘Hindi-wallahs’ would have no cause to protest. From Marathi to Hindi to English and then—for one brief and frightening section in The Human Voice—you even spoke in French. Cocteau requires the actress to ‘speak in a foreign language’ during one cross-connection in his play. My heart went out to you on one particular day when, during the intermission between the two plays, you realized that you couldn’t speak the English language anymore. That terror was very real to me. Through language itself you had to embody two philosophies of life. In Kunti, there is a strong suggestion towards the end of the play, that there is another birth, another cycle of life awaiting Kunti as she fuses with the sun. All her betrayals and traumas are apotheosized in her final moment of stillness. There is even a possibility that Kunti will return to live life on her own terms, not dictated by the men in her family. In contrast to this expansive vision of life, Cocteau’s world is distinctly nihilistic. His woman-without-a–name is bound to an absent other, whose silent voice she coils around her neck along with the telephone wire. So profound is her despair that there is no possibility of moksha for her. When the other rings off, her ‘life-line’ is cut. In her final moments, she is disconnected, motionless, her legs splayed in a foetal position, with the telephone stuck in her crotch. One evening, after you had driven yourself through the torrent of emotions in The Human Voice, alternating between longing and aversion, pain and pleasure, distance and proximity, orgasm and coldness, you murmured the last lines ‘I love you’ incessantly to a hoarse whisper…and I really believed that you had died on stage. Alaknanda Samarth is dead, I said to myself. When I went back-stage, you were still spread-eagled on the bed, scarcely breathing, and I saw what you had gone through that evening. Two run-throughs of two plays in Hindi and English (and French): the split in these worlds had temporarily engulfed you in

LETTER TO AN ACTRESS 215

nothingness. Then you revived an hour later, had some coffee, and received your notes from Kumar. You possess what Nina in The Seagull declares as the true mark of an actress —stamina. You needed it for Cocteau, but most of all for Kunti. She was your real challenge, and for the rest of this letter, I will focus on your struggle to represent her. You went through hell in your first rehearsals. You felt that you were being wrenched apart not only by the polarities of the plays, but by the way you were directed by Kumar to move, to speak, to feel, to be. Your training at RADA became a burden, a seeming redundancy, a false skin that you had to shed. You could not rely on any of your usual resources. The moment you ‘tried’ something, Kumar would tell you not to shape the text but to speak through it. Just be the tree, be Kurukshetra, be Kunti, he kept telling you. But when you delved into your being, you would involuntarily cry—bitterly, relentlessly—to Kumar’s intense discomfiture. He wanted you to go beyond tears and what he described as your ‘narcissistic ego’. When you attempted transformations, you were told not to display your technique. Then when you argued and reasoned about how a line would ‘reach’ the audience, you were promptly told: ‘Stop communicating. We’re not in the media business.’ So Alak, you really went through hell. I can understand why you once dreamed that you were holding Kumar’s decapitated head in front of your diaphragm. He couldn’t understand (or so you felt) the psychology of the actor, intensely vulnerable in its introspection and self-exposure. As a film director working in theatre for the first time, Kumar, too, went through his own trauma about theatre being more ‘exploitative’ than film. He discovered that the actor in theatre is the medium. You were his material, in all your rawness and confusion, not some film that he would edit in the privacy of his studio. Being together for six to eight hours a day certainly heightened your mutual sense of ‘violating’ and even ‘entering’ each other’s beings. Only later did you realize that your inner being as an actress mattered very much to Kumar. But his method of drawing it out was strange, wasn’t it? Even subversive? Instead of freeing you from your ‘ego’, your ‘Western packaging’ through some gentle process of trial-and-error, he set limits for you from the very beginning. You had to find your freedom within his framework. What were these limits? Not the usual blocking and directions that most actors crave, this was a great deal more microanalytical in perspective and detail. For the very first word in the text—Kisne?—you spent hours trying to find the right tone. No one, I guess, has ever told you to move your head in a 30 degree angle, then turn your eyes left, breathe inwards, then move on the diagonal on the next line, all in one flow. The most difficult moments were the contrary impulses of voice and movement, that Kumar wanted you to keep apart at all costs. ‘Don’t run the emotions into one another’, ‘Don’t move with the text’, ‘Right with the body, left with the voice’. Most bewilderingly, he once asked you to ‘play Karna with your voice, Kunti with your body’. No wonder you felt dislocated, your

216 RETURNING

body had to be realigned to your voice, you had to find a new system of incorporating discontinuities within seamlessness. Indeed, you had to rethink the idea of flow in theatre. You protested violently: I can’t walk fast and speak slowly, I can’t keep the vacika (speech) and angika (gestures, movement) distinct in my body. And as you rightly observed, even the actors of Kathakali and Krishnattam don’t have to face this challenge, because in their performance structures, the actors and singers are clearly distinguished. In Koodiyattam, however, there are sections where the actor is capable of speaking and moving in the most intricate combinations imaginable. But I’m not a Koodiyattam performer, I hear you protest, I’m just an actress in my own right. That’s true: you haven’t been trained since you were a child to ‘depersonalize’ your body through codified gestures and voice patterns. You have been exposed to a different training and to many tensions and experiences in the world from which the traditional performer is protected. You have no temple to return to except the one in your heart. And you don’t have the time or work-structure to devote yourself to Kunti for years and years. You have a specific rehearsal period quite unlike the Koodiyattam performer, who has no need to rehearse because his training never stops. For all these reasons, it would be quite unfair to expect the clarity of a traditional performer from you. You have to be seen as you are with all your limitations and very perceptible strengths. Let me tell you something for your reassurance. What you and Kumar are trying to do is much harder than mere ‘imitation’ of a traditional performance. You are exploring a new idiom of acting in the Indian theatre that is linked to our traditional sources on the level of principles rather than direct borrowings. In this sense, you are distinct from those Indian directors who have ‘turned to the folk’ to discover their own ‘roots’. You know what their productions are like— proscenium-bound, cosmetic spectacles of ‘folk theatre’, where there is a great deal of colour and masala, hand-held curtains and masks, contrived rituals and ‘tribal’ dances. Some of them are pleasing to the eye, not unlike our handicrafts sold in the Cottage Industries, but almost all of them are devoid of inner energy and integrity. The worst examples are those ‘authentic’ productions which attempt to be ‘faithful’ to the Natyasastra, where the ‘rules’ are copied with no creative transformations, no confrontation whatsoever. The Bombay Shakuntala is just another form of ‘illustrative realism’, disguised in traditional trappings. Thank God you and Kumar are not even faintly enamoured by these exotic traps. You know that our tradition cannot be paraphrased and recycled to suit our purposes. Nor does it require false reverence. It is rich enough, conceptually and formally, to deal with any of our subversions. Indeed, we are most true to our tradition not when we illustrate it, but when we subvert it through our own energy and vision. We can do this, however, only when we accept that our tradition is not ‘out there’ in some distant, immutable past, but that it survives

LETTER TO AN ACTRESS 217

within us, buried under layers of social conventions, repression, filmi stereotypes, and more recently, our ‘Doordarshan reality’ which is systematically levelling out almost all creativity in India today. You know what television is doing to our actors. It is compelling them to act from the neck upwards with no support of the spine, no grounding in earth. Their two-dimensionality is complemented by stock facial expressions and rhetorical deliveries. Fortunately, you don’t suffer from these stereotypes yourself, but you have your own traps as an actress. Wisely, Kumar subverted your training by placing you within unfamiliar limits. Instead of allowing you to shape the character of Kunti with all the obligatory motivations and subtext, he compelled you to create a musical score out of Kunti, where the focus was not on psychology or theatrical transformations, but on a state of emotions rendered like a piece of music. For many people in the audience, this music was dissonant. Certainly, you were not permitted to sing the text. There were abrupt switches in your voice, a varying use of resonators, punctuated by whispers and occasional screams. The most ‘emotional’ of cries was the one following Kunti’s revelation that Karna is her first son. This cry would begin with the nasal and head resonators, move through the neck into the chest and diaphragm, from where it would begin to beat like a drum to produce the final vibrations. This cry was vocalized, not emoted. Kumar never allowed you to ‘express’ grief—the cry did that for you. What mattered to him was not your ‘inner feeling,’ but the swara (note) from where you had to start the cry and to which you had eventually to return. Similarly, the nuances of emotion in Kunti’s life were not extrapolated from her past; they were rendered as shrutis, microtonal intervals between notes, almost undecipherable to the ear. Most significant of all was the cry of the bird, which Kunti keeps hearing throughout the play. I had reservations about this bird when I first read S.Pillai’s text, because it seemed deliberately mystifying. There was no substance in it. The cry could mean whatever you wanted it to mean—Kunti’s longing to be with her first child, her yearning for deliverance from the cycle of life, her resentment at being used by her own society. Instead of attaching such meanings to the cry, Kumar made you scream the bird with no motivation whatsoever. Once again, what mattered to him was not the meaning of the bird, but the pitch at which it had to be vocalized, its high frequency, followed by the sustained whisper of your opening lines. It is a pity that you could not use the pocket microphone that Kumar wanted to attach to your costume. This would have enabled you to modulate the whispers and shrutis more minutely. But more than that, it would have served to ‘distance’ your performance, thereby providing the audience with a clearer understanding as to how the piece should be viewed. In typical Bombay fashion, 000they came prepared to ‘identify’ with Kunti in some kind of ‘voyeuristic’ act. And voyeurism (as you well know) is anathema to Kumar—hence his need to transform the character into a musical score, and to place you on an enormous

218 RETURNING

stage where you became a figure rather than a recognizable person. If your voice could have been subtly amplified, your performance would have been even more appropriately distanced. And yet, I fail to reconcile this ‘distancing’ quality in Kumar’s direction with his desire for ‘fusion’. I should not forget that when he first thought of using a microphone, it was not to alienate the audience, but to facilitate their participation in a ritual act. At that time, he had envisioned Kunti played against the sea and setting sun in a natural environment. Remember, you had your doubts from the very beginning. In your usual down-to-earth manner, you asked: ‘How do we know that the sun will set on time? What if it rains?’ And Kumar was deeply grieved: ‘You don’t believe in existence? In revelation?’ It was sad, I think, that the wind was too strong in the open space for your voice to carry (and the microphone could only have complicated matters). So Kunti had to be taken indoors into a darkened auditorium (appropriate for operetta), and inevitably, it developed a very different shape and resonance. Let me be frank. I think taking Kunti indoors radically altered the concept of the piece. Now it was Kumar’s work that was subverted by the theatre space itself, and not just by the architecture and acoustics, but by its associations with a particular kind of ‘commodity culture’ patronized by an elitist Bombay society. I might also add that the very act of doing Kunti on the cultural premises of our major atomic research centre is more than an irony. Kunti represents energy, a total fusion with the elements; despite the trials in her life, she remains a lifegiving force. How cruel that she should be placed in such clinical premises that almost negate the possibilities of creation. If I had directed Kunti, I wouldn’t have imagined her against the sea and setting sun bordering the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. I would have placed her in one of the laboratories of the Institute itself, thereby highlighting the savage irony of the location. One evening, when I was coming to rehearsal, I saw two men in business suits walking briskly towards the dining hall. One of them turned to the other and said: ‘What’s he working on?’ And the other replied: ‘Weapons.’ They moved on to the dining hall while Kunti struggled to live in the theatre. How could there by anything celebratory in such a space? Your Kunti was condemned to be aesthetic, so relentlessly aesthetic that the idiom of the performance became the primary source of attention. One was compelled to look at you rather than to be with you. So ‘abrupt’ were most of your movements, sharply punctuated with turns of the neck and shiftings of energy in unexpected directions, that one was never allowed to rest in one’s viewing of your performance. There was always the anticipation of another ‘dissonance’, another ‘asymmetrical’ move, another infinitesimal ‘shock’. You notice that I am putting all these words within inverted commas, because I don’t fully endorse their negative implications. Dissonance is perfectly acceptable to me, and even pleasing, so long as it is situated within a coherent structure. Once I accepted that your performance was shaped through tensions resulting from opposite energies, I found it appropriate that your Kunti was

LETTER TO AN ACTRESS 219

consistently decentred. Don’t get me wrong: you were centred in relation to your inner concentration, but the mise-en-scène was decentred in the way Kumar positioned your body on stage and juxtaposed your discontinuities of voice and gesture. In retrospect, I am beginning to wonder about the original scheme of the miseen-scène. Remember, Kumar had wanted to use a dancer on stage who would shape the text with her mudras and postures, while you vocalized it. This separation of angika and vacika could have resulted in a more ‘harmonious’ production, but it would have removed the essential tension that gives your work its particular immediacy. In your body, the angika and vacika were embroiled in a tense score. If your performance was ‘about’ anything, it was about this tension to incorporate traditional elements of Indian aesthetics within a contemporary state of being. The design of the production certainly enhanced the tension in your performance. Appropriately, your body, pliant and human, was silhouetted against an enormous triangular sculpture with three rings on the outer apex. Designed by Akbar Padamsee, an early proponent of modernism in Indian art, the sculpture counterpointed the rigour of your performance through its phallic thrust of energy. Its suspension in space contrasted sharply with your rootedness in earth. I cannot understand why the tensions in your performance did not ignite. Perhaps you were overly preoccupied with the grammar of your acting, notably the punctuations between transitions. When you rotated your body ‘mechanically’ and stamped your feet, I knew that you had entered a new phase in the narrative, but I also found the ‘punctuation’ obtrusive. Similarly, I was jarred by your free-wheeling use of the space from one end to the other during the transitional passages because there was no inner energy in the movement. I think you should have subverted Kumar’s attempts to ‘dis-locate’ your performance in such a manner. Unlike film, where you can alter and even obliterate space through fluid cuts, the stage always remains where it is. In this context, I sensed an unresolved tension between the concentrated space of your body within a particular frame, and the larger space of the stage itself, which almost seemed vacant in patches, as if it were waiting to be filled up. If you failed to fill the entire space with your being, it was because your performance had been ‘edited’ in discontinuous frames. Perhaps the lighting could have helped to enhance the fluidity and dispersal of energy in the performance space. So far I have only talked about Kunti as a ‘form’. I have not raised any questions about her ‘relevance’ because I have assumed (as you do) that she is part of the Indian psyche. Remember what your mother once said with her characteristic commonsense: Kunti does not belong to you or to Kumar Shahani. She belongs to millions of people in India, who all see some aspect of Kunti in themselves. Therefore, before you subvert Kunti, you have an obligation to confront the expectations of the audience.

220 RETURNING

This is so true, but the difficulty lies in the word ‘expectations’. It could so easily imply a surrender to the accessible. I don’t think I need to emphasize that Kumar may be one of the few directors in India today who has never capitalized on the accessible. Rather, he has made things difficult for himself (and for his audience) by remaining absolutely true to the singularity of his vision. If he appears ‘elitist’, it is because he continues to see the familiar in a totally unfamiliar light. I just hope that he never loses sight of the ‘real’. By ‘real’, of course, I do not mean ‘realistic’, the trappings of well-made plays with social messages. I mean something more elusive that is linked to the historical moment of a creation. When something is ‘real’, I know that it belongs where it does. It is not a formal exercise that leaves you hungering for meaning. The ‘real’ asserts what is necessary in art, not what is obligatory. On a more technical level, the ‘real’ is an element that calls into question the formality of the work itself. It could be a detail that stings the viewer into a recognition of the world surrounding the play. It could also be a different level of energy that infuses the performance structure with a sense of the commonplace. The ‘real’ is that intractable element of ‘life’ that resists the autonomy of art. Our traditional theatre in India is permeated with a sense of the ‘real’. Unfortunately, our critics and directors fail to see it, preferring to wallow in the minutiae of natyadharmi, the so-called stylized presentation of a play. The conventions of lokadharmi pertaining to modes of behaviour and action in everyday life are relatively neglected. All too often they are dismissed as ‘realistic’ without any confrontation of their levels of abstraction or possibilities of envisioning the ‘real’. I cannot deny that Kunti could have used some lokadharmi to enhance the mythical dimension of the production. It was somewhat too monochromatic in its stylized beauty. Its mise-en-scène needed to be questioned by a sense of the ‘real’. While I felt a rare artistry in Kunti, I missed the myth. Your new idiom of acting has definitely broken new ground, but it still needs to free itself from ‘art’ and burn with the incandescent life of the Mahabharata. One thing is certain; you will never be able to return to your pre-Kunti being as an actress. Now your gestures will be charged with new energies, your walk will be more of a dance, your voice will be a score of notes, your silence will be more sound. Kunti has helped you to grow as an actress, and one day you will be true to her. That sounds like a back-handed compliment, doesn’t it? But I don’t mean it that way. It’s just that the task of playing Kunti is enormous, and perhaps, it requires much more than the skills of a particular actress. Kunti needs a community of people for whom the values of the Mahabharata are not merely the subject of television serial, but the very source of their everyday lives and dreams. You need to derive your strength as an actress from the collective faith of your audience.

LETTER TO AN ACTRESS 221

At one time, I used to think that this audience could be found almost anywhere. But now I realize that spectators have to be ‘trained’ as much as actors through a slow process of learning. New idioms of acting are intrinsically related to new modes of seeing. Theatre cultures can evolve only through sustained meetings between actors and spectators, where the determinisms of existing modes of representation can be questioned through a reciprocity of choices. Let us be under no illusion that these meetings can be realized without organization. Our greatest failure in the Indian theatre has been our inability to organize our resources. In this regard, our poverty often becomes a pretext for tolerating incompetence. If we want new meetings and visions in the theatre, we will have to fight for a new system of production. We have to stop demeaning our imagination through the rank amateurism of our theatre work, where anything is acceptable, costumes made out of gunny bags and cigarette-tin spotlights. Not only does this cultivated primitivism mock our theatrical tradition, it also reinforces established assumptions that artists can afford to be poor. We are not, of course, demanding five-star theatres, but those basic conditions of work and training without which no idiom of acting can evolve. I need hardly add that this fight for a new aesthetic will necessitate new relationships to existing sources of funding. We cannot retreat into safe corners in order to evade the stigma of corporate philanthropy. This is the most effective way, in my view, of being marginalized. Rather, we need to negotiate those affiliations that are useful to us at particular points in time, and make sure that they do not diffuse our line of action. Obviously, this is a risky undertaking, but it is worth a fight and many hours of sustained work. In this context, I have never doubted either your stamina or vision. What you need is to structure your process of work on a long-term basis and extend it to like-minded individuals. For that, you may have to return to India as you already have to play Kunti. She has been your link not only to a new idiom of performance, but to a new process of living. Vulnerable, yet free, you continue to be in her hold, and she guides in her own elusive way.

222

Chapter 13 Ninasam A cultural alternative

Far away from New Delhi, where decisions about Indian culture are becoming increasingly centralized, there is a relatively unknown village called Heggodu in the Shimoga district of Karnataka. Secluded amidst paddy fields and areca nut plantations, this village is perhaps best known for an institution called Ninasam, which administers a theatre school, a repertory company, a film society and a workshop unit that has spread theatre and film culture to all nineteen districts of Karnataka. If we had to choose a cultural centre in India today, it would not, to my mind, be found in any of the major institutions in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras or Bhopal, which continue to be isolated from the needs of our people. Rather, I would locate this ‘centre’ in the village of Heggodu, where one finds alternatives not only for the Indian theatre but for the mobilization and growth of our culture at large. Situated about 350 km from Bangalore, on the road leading from Sagar to Mangalore, Heggodu continues to have a population of barely 500 people. It is the centre of sixteen villages which cover a total area of 14,000 acres; 2,100 acres are cultivated. Though the Idigas constitute about 50 per cent of the population, the area is dominated economically, socially and culturally by the Havyaka Brahmins (who continue to be the leading members and sponsors of Ninasam’s activities). In this rural area of north-west Karnataka, where television has just arrived, there are three libraries, four youth associations and six women’s organizations. There is one high school in Heggodu itself, two post offices and three banks. Judging from these statistics, it would not seem that Heggodu would be a promising site for a theatre group to flourish, still less to inspire a cultural movement throughout Karnataka. Even K.V.Subbanna, the modest visionary who has been the guiding spirit of Ninasam since its inception, is surprised by the scale and momentum of his institution’s activities. And yet, if one had to analyse Subbanna’s supreme organizational abilities, enhanced through socialist principles of work and production, one could learn how it is still possible in India to ‘serve’ people through our culture. If Ninasam has lasted while most small organizations have failed, it is because there is a method in its vision. Not only has this vision been integrated with work on many different levels of action, it has been shaped in accordance to the needs

224 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

of the community in and around Heggodu. When Ninasam first started in 1949 as an amateur dramatic society, this was in direct response to a local need for entertainment and theatre activity. Around this time, Subbanna and two of his friends began a parallel social activity through the publication of a cyclostyled newspaper. This was the first local newspaper in the entire district. Circulating 700–800 copies of this weekly was a small action, but a significant one. It reveals Subbanna’s early involvement in local realities and problems which can be most meaningfully confronted through the development of local resources. When it was proposed, for instance, that the Manipal Academy should administer the Lal Bahadur College in Sagar, which opened in 1963, Subbanna challenged the proposal in a public meeting. He affirmed the necessity of local administration, and won the trust of his people. He worked as the first Secretary of the College till 1966, when the partisan political affiliations of some of its leading members compelled him to resign. By this time, however, he had already become an active member of the Rare Taste Club, which was the first film society in Sagar to show classics like Pather Panchali and Jalsaghar. As a representative of this Club, Subbanna attended the first Film Appreciation Course in Pune organized by Marie Seton. This was in 1967, approximately seven years before Ninasam started its own film society, the Ninasam Chitrasamaj, with the aid of a 16 mm film projector. In 1978, this society organized the first rural film festival in India, featuring classics by Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Bergman and Ray, which were seen by an average of 1, 000 people a day over a ten-day period. The following year, in addition to the Festival, which has now become an annual event, the Chitrasamaj organized a Film Appreciation Course, conducted by Satish Bahadur of the FTII, Pune and other scholars and directors. This course (which has also been regularized) is attended by an average of 75–80 participants a year, including journalists, teachers, photographers, writers and farmers. If one assesses the bare facts of Ninasam’s film development, one cannot help commending the steady momentum provided by Subbanna’s direction. What began as a personal interest in film deepened through his exposure to cinematic technique and art at the film course in Pune. A direct consequence of this course was the formation of a local film society based in Heggodu. This use of knowledge gained from an urban institution (and its adaptation in a rural context), is a recurring motif in Subbanna’s career. For instance, when he completed his university degree in Mysore, he did not stay on in the city or move on to Bangalore, which would have been the normal trend for most graduates with rural backgrounds. He returned to Heggodu, using his education to begin formative work at the Lal Bahadur College in Sagar, just as he used his exposure to film in Pune to start his own film society at home. Though Subbanna tends to underplay his own initiative, claiming that it is the community that has made Ninasam’s work possible, one cannot deny that his deep affinities to this community have concretized his vision. The personal and the social are integrally related in his work. In this regard, his faith in institutions

RETURNING 225

has enabled him to translate personal needs into social actions, which totally counters the tendency of most theatre directors in India, who tend to promote their own careers at the expense of building institutions with a viable future. Generally, idealists (in the world of arts) stay away from institutions. They prefer to ‘freelance’, maintaining a tenuous relationship with permanent structures. This is not Subbanna’s strategy. When he has an idea about any longterm project, he is busy right away preparing a memorandum and budget, allotting responsibilities to the people around him. He is not scared of balance sheets and registration acts (which are, frequently, incomprehensible to most artists). Above all, he is an organizer who believes in the value of preparing schedules, preferably one for each day, which he invariably follows with a matter-of-fact calm. His maximum use of time seems to be nourished rather than hindered by the rural surroundings, where there are no distractions, no bureaucratic interferences, no traffic jams to impede the momentum of work. Like his steady chew of paan and areca nut to which he is addicted, Subbanna works consistently, seemingly oblivious of the scale of his activities. It would be tempting to describe his mode of operation as Gandhian were it not for the fact that he cares for the arts with a passion that Gandhi might not have understood. Otherwise, the decentralization of his entire operation, the economy and simplicity of his infrastructure, and above all, his deep regard for the village as the basic social unit around which all explorations of Indian culture must converge—these are qualities of which Gandhi himself might have approved. Though Ninasam is much too secular in spirit to be called an ashram, its long hours of work, the single-minded dedication of its members and its total acceptance of simplicity in everyday matters like accommodation and food, convey the rigour and cheer of a ‘theatre ashram’, whose members are bound through common principles of work. At this point, it is necessary to stress that there is no romanticization of rural life in Subbanna’s vision. He simply accepts the village as a place of work, which also happens to be his birthplace. The soil and the trees are not merely images to him; they determine his very survival as an agriculturist (his family profession). His acceptance of the village as the dominant social milieu of his life has undeniably strengthened his attitude to grassroots activity. It has also prevented Ninasam from becoming another Shantiniketan, an etherealized vision of a harmonious life, so rhapsodically envisioned by Tagore, only to corrode into the rotting bureaucracy that it has become today. Despite the obvious idealism that has inspired Ninasam’s creation, it is not a dreamworld, an artificial refuge self-consciously created to resist the vulgarity of our times. Its value lies in its activity, not in its aura of humanism or proximity to nature. Once again, I repeat, Ninasam is a place of work. What kind of work? For the most part, Ninasam focuses on theatre work, implemented through the training of fifteen students a year at the Ninasam Theatre Institute, and concretized through the productions of Ninasam Tirugata, an itinerant repertory company that has performed in all nineteen districts of Karnataka. Before these units were created, Ninasam was an

226 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

amateur theatre company. Originally named after the local deity, the Sri Nilkanteshwara Natyaseva Sangha (of which Ninasam is the present acronym) was made up of a rather conservative group of actors, who did not share Subbanna’s taste for realistic drama. Even after Independence, ‘company drama’ (as popularized by the famous Gubbi Theatre) continued to be the model for most theatre people. In this respect, it is significant to note that the IPTA movement did not extend to Karnataka. Consequently, while the Bengali theatre was staging European classics in the realist tradition after the landmark success of Nabanna, Subbanna’s group in the late 1940s was still doing D.L.Roy’s Shah Jahan. Two important Kannadigas stimulated the growth of Ninasam’s early activities. One was B.V. Karanth, who staged two children’s plays, Panjarashale and Heddayana, shortly after he had graduated from the National School of Drama. The other important visitor was Ramakrishna Hegde, who had visited the High School at Heggodu in 1971, while he was the Finance Minister in the Congress government. Whatever Hegde’s political limitations may be, one cannot deny that he has been a warm and generous supporter of the arts. During his visit to Heggodu, Subbanna presented him with a plan to build a theatre in the vilage for Rs 85,000. Within 2–3 months, Hegde responded with a generous offer of financial assistance. Over the years, the theatre has been reconstructed and fully equipped at a total cost of Rs 3.2 lakhs (of which 40 per cent was funded by the Central Government, another 40 per cent by the State Government, with public funds covering the deficit). It cannot be stressed enough that the construction of a theatre house in Heggodu was an extremely wise decision on the part of Subbanna and his associates. This simple construction (so totally different from the ostentatious edifices that pass off as ‘theatres’ in most parts of the country), is the nucleus for all of Ninasam’s activities. One of the joys in working at Ninasam, as I can testify from my own experience as a director, is that it has a stage on which one can rehearse for hours and even days on end. This is nothing less than a luxury for most theatre people in India, who can barely afford one or two rehearsals in a rented hall, if the bureaucrats in the theatre administration are willing to cooperate in the first place. Needless to say, almost no theatre group in India owns a performance space, which makes actors totally dependent on the whims and schedules of other organizations. Apart from owning its own performance space, Ninasam has designed it in a way that is appropriate to its needs. The problem with most of our cultural complexes like the National Centre for the Performing Arts or Bharat Bhawan, the ‘white elephants’ of our culture, is that their architectural sites are planned even before there is the semblance of creative work. This results in an essentially stultifying environment, where one is left staring at empty spaces that prohibit creative interactions. More often than not, these edifices are designed by experts who are more interested in creating impressive facades rather than intimate work spaces. Inevitably, this results in aberrations like enormous stages without adequate wing space or poor acoustics that demand the use of microphones.

RETURNING 227

Having constructed the Shivaram Karanth Rangamandira (named after Karnataka’s most celebrated literary and cultural figure), Subbanna decided to start a theatre school that would focus on an intensive, ten-month training programme for students from different parts of Karnataka. Though the Ninasam Theatre Institute is ostensibly modelled on the National School of Drama—its principal, C.R.Jambe, and other faculty members, K.V.Akshara (Subbanna’s son) and Krishnamurthy, are graduates of NSD—the ethos of Ninasam’s training programme is significantly different from NSD’s more prestigious three-year diploma course. Apart from the obvious differences in the locations of the two schools, it should be stressed that most of Ninasam’s graduates invariably return to their small towns and villages, where they continue to do work on a grassroots level. This direction is very different from NSD’s students, who invariably gravitate towards the cities, notably Bombay. It is true that some of our most talented actors like Naseerudin Shah, Om Puri and Rohini Hattangady have graduated from NSD, but what have they done for the theatre? Their careers in the so-called ‘parallel cinema’ have not stimulated a similar movement on stage. It seems highly questionable that the Central Government should spend Rs 75 lakhs if not more on the NSD every year, when most of its graduates have been unable to produce theatre on a regular basis, still less create their own alternative companies to extend the languages of theatre. It is also necessary to question the validity of making students from different parts of India speak in Hindi, at the expense of developing insights into their own languages and theatre cultures. At times, of course, the problem is solved when there are almost no students from the southern states in this ‘national’ institution. An analysis of NSD’s bureaucratization lies beyond the scope of this essay, but its enforced centralization, to my mind, can only result in more tensions and arbitrariness. It seems to me that what we need in India are more schools like the Ninasam Theatre Institute (whose fifteen students receive a monthly stipend of Rs 200 from the state government). Here there are fewer pretensions and a more sustained exposure to the discipline of theatre—at times, the students work for close to fourteen hours a day. Much more thought, however, needs to be given to their training. Like the NSD students, whose curriculum includes halfassimilated Stanislavski along with a hotch-potch of traditional Indian styles of acting, the Ninasam students are unable to differentiate between distinct acting traditions. Nonetheless, some useful lessons are being conveyed to the students not just about the mechanics of theatre, but of their relationships to life and possibilities of adaptation to local conditions of work. Characteristically, Subbanna keeps in touch with his students even after they graduate. When he realized that there was no ready employment for his actors— a critical problem faced by the graduates of the Trichur School of Drama—he decided to start a repertory company that could support at least fifteen to twenty of his past students. Moreover, he believed that a travelling company could help

228 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

to spread theatre culture throughout Karnataka, thereby enabling his actors to create their own companies. Between October 1985 and April 1988, Tirugata has performed 430 shows of eleven productions including Mrichakatika, The Threepenny Opera, Ali Baba, The Lower Depths, Macbeth, which were staged in all nineteen districts of the state to approximately three lakhs of people. Significantly, three-quarters of the audience have come from the mofussil and rural areas, who are generally considered ‘uncultured’ and capable of appreciating only the crudest commercial plays or the most sensational Yakshagana. Not only has Tirugata been able to confront such intellectual prejudices, it has also succeeded in demonstrating that a professional theatre can be more or less self-supporting. Initially, it was estimated that the project would incur a deficit of Rs 15,000– 20,000 during its first tour. With his customary caution, which enables him to take risks, Subbanna recommended the collection of donations to form a security fund. It is good to know that this fund still exists as a deposit, because Tirugata has always been able to cover its costs. Apart from charging Rs 1,000–1,500 per show, Ninasam also requests free board and lodging for its actors from the local organizers. Additional support has been received from the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Department of Culture in New Delhi. Purely on the level of organization, Tirugata must be hailed as one of the most dynamic ventures in the contemporary Indian theatre. At a time when most urban theatre groups have yet to perform in a small town or village, when they are unable to reach different communities even within their own cities, it is encouraging to know how Tirugata has been able to reach so many people. It is hard to say what is more impressive: the fact that an average of 756 spectators watched each show in Tirugata’s second season of plays or the even more unbelievable fact that there is actually a theatre organization in India that keeps records of its ongoing history. These records include a detailed breakdown of shows in each district, the number of performances, the size of the audiences, the ratio of rural to urban spectators (3:1), responses collected through questionnaires and reviews (not just by the critics, but by the spectators as well, who participated in a special ‘review contest’ of Tirugata’s productions, sponsored by a local magazine). The organization is all the more impressive when one considers the hazards involved in staging a repertoire of plays in vastly different performance spaces. During the first tour, which provided a testing ground for conditions of theatre work, Tirugata discovered that out of 62 spaces, only three had fully equipped stages. More often than not, the actors had to work within the vagaries of community halls, open air theatres, platforms and small stages in schools and colleges. Very often there was no greenroom, and the voltage of the spotlights would fluctuate dangerously. At times, more people would show up for a performance than the space could accommodate, for instance, an influx of 2,500 children for a production of Neeli Kudure (an adaptation of The Blue Horse by B.V.Karanth).

RETURNING 229

But with all these problems, one must note that Tirugata has continued without cancelling a single show due to the illness of a performer or for any administrative problem. There are no understudies in this travelling company, and the work (both onstage and backstage) is very strenuous. Though the personal relationships of the actors is a subject that would need closer scrutiny, the group spirit of Tirugata is strong. Like a regular stock company, the actors are responsible not only for their performances but for the sets, lights, costumes, make-up which have to be set up for each show, then packed up and transported for the next performance. No art, to my mind, fosters deeper social interactions than theatre. First, the actors have to learn to live and work with one another, and second, they have to interact as a group with audiences in different social contexts. The process of learning is enormous, particularly since it involves trust and responsibility on the most concrete levels imaginable. Tirugata’s socialization is particularly significant since it involves women as actors, and not just as spectators. At a time when most Indian actresses need to be dropped home after a rehearsal, if they are not already chaperoned by a relative or husband, it is surely encouraging that a number of Tirugata’s actresses have been free to travel and explore their creative possibilities in the rogh, immediate world of an itinerant theatre. Though it would be difficult to fault the basic premises and drive of Tirugata’s activities, some of its critics have complained about the mediocrity of its aesthetics. Certainly, the audience is a dominant point of reference for Tirugata’s directors, but this does not mean that their productions have been totally simplified to cater to the ‘illiterate’. One of their guiding premises is that theatre ‘should not be boring in the guise of “seriousness” ’. This results in an assertively entertaining theatre that is accessible, but not simplistic. For the most part, what one remembers of a Tirugata production is its technical competence, its tight coordination and suggestively economic use of sets and lights. The characterizations of the actors tend to be broad rather than textured. They are most at home with the ‘company drama’ idiom, so strategically exploited in Miss Sadarame, but they are more constrained in Macbeth by the verse and the psychological depths of tragic emotion. Likewise in The Lower Depths, one discovers that naturalism is not ‘natural’ to Tirugata’s actors, who have yet to free themselves from histrionics and filmi gestures. It is a small, yet telling fact of Indian theatre history that both The Lower Depths and Macbeth were among the earliest productions of Utpal Dutt during his association with the Little Theatre Group. In fact, Macbeth was one of his first productions that toured in the villages of West Bengal. Almost forty years later, it is significant that Tirugata should choose precisely these two plays for widespread exposure to mass audiences. At one level this could indicate that the Kannada theatre has had a late start with respect to the conscientization of audiences through the classics. Its first openly Leftist theatre organization, Samudaya, which had done some seminal work in street theatre in the villages, was

230 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

formed as late as 1975. Unfortunately, it is no longer as active, leaving the Kannada theatre more or less apolitical. Unlike the Bengali theatre, which has been associated with a tradition of dissent, the distinguishing quality of Karnataka’s theatre culture has been its openness to cultural stimuli from different parts of India. Subbanna puts it well when he described Kannada culture as ‘tolerant’, neither rejecting nor accepting anything completely. This acceptance of what is valuable in all cultures, irrespective of their origin, is a guiding principle of Ninasam’s selection of films and plays. Just as the Chitrasamaj takes pride in showing the films of Eisenstein and Resnais along with the Apu Trilogy so also does Tirugata represent Mrichakatika along with The Threepenny Opera and an adaptation of Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. The eclecticism of the selection is controlled by the modes of production adopted by Tirugata. As a travelling theatre company performing to large audiences, it is obviously more interested in plays with an ‘epic’ scope of action rather than more abstruse, introspective examinations of the human psyche. Particularly significant selections have included the editing and amalgamation of two ‘historical’ plays, Bettada Arasu and Vigada Vikramaraya, into one memorable production. These plays did much to revive the memory of Samsa, one of the most elusive and tormented of Kannada playwrights, who ended his life-long fascination with the Mysore kings (whom he invariably represented as decadent and corrupt) by committing suicide. Not only is Subbanna acutely aware of neglected ‘masterpieces’, he has also turned his attention to a much neglected issue in contemporary Inidan theatre: the rewriting of classics. By ‘rewriting’, I do not merely mean adapting a story into a theatrical idiom, but countering a text with social and political premises that subvert it of its ‘original’ meaning. Appropriately, Subbanna’s most controversial ‘rewrite’, Lokashakuntala, is nothing less than an attempt to redefine the social context of Kalidasa’s classic from the point of view of the ‘common man’. What happens to a man-woman relationship in an imperialist structure? How do the worlds of the ashram and the court, the city and the woods, depend on each other for definition and reinforcement of existing modes of power? To what extent is Dushyanta’s problematic forgetting and remembrance of Shakuntala conditioned by his own institutionalized role as a monarch? Inevitably, to confront these ‘crude’ questions (the kind Brecht would have liked), Subbanna had to ‘rewrite’ the play by elaborating on the minor characters like the hunters and the fisherman. He also added two incidents depicting Dushyanta’s love affair with a hunter girl and a performance of yajna by his subjects, who pray to the gods to bless their king with a child. Shakuntala’s rejection at the court was edited so that it appeared as if she had been granted an official hearing, nothing more. Significantly, it was enacted in a formal Sanskrit, which contradicted the colloquial idiom of the rest of the play, inspired by the rough lyricism of Yakshagana.

RETURNING 231

Though Lokashakuntala has been criticized for its ‘populism’, a charge that is often raised against Tirugata’s work in general, I think the very impulse to ‘rewrite’ a sacrosanct text is refreshing. Shakuntala is enriched, to my mind, through questioning rather than deference. Instead of perpetuating the assumptions of ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ underlying proscenium-bound spectacles of ‘traditional theatre’, invented by our most prominent contemporary directors, Subbanna rejects any false veneration of the past. He is not reluctant to assert the discontinuities in our tradition, which are so often glossed over or subsumed within categories of ‘timelessness’ and ‘eternal truth’. In reaction to the popularization of ‘traditional forms’ in India today, Ninasam tends to avoid using these forms altogether. Though its students are exposed to some of the basic principles of Yakshagana, it does not form the basis of their training. Subbanna is aware that the traditional arts require specific disciplines that belong to particular contexts. Consequently, he has avoided using his school as a centre for the promotion of Yakshagana. This would have been only too easy at a time when the business of Yakshagana is booming. Unlike Kathakali actors, now mass-produced from innumerable dance-factories, facing increasing unemployment as the supply exceeds the demand for dancers, the Yakshagana performers have no problems finding a job, even though their ‘training’ is woefully inadequate. Though I am not a purist, it is sad to see this art commodified in the crassest manner imaginable, its idiom almost totally undecipherable under layers of half-assimilated company acting, filmi histrionics and even vulgarized Bharat Natyam (by the more ‘sophisticated’ artists). Significantly, Subbanna has never attempted to ‘reform’ this state of affairs, which must be seen in relation to larger socio-cultural factors, notably the breakdown of the gurukula system and the intervention of new ‘experts’, bureaucrats and salesmen. What matters to him is not the ‘preservation’ of culture, but the creation of new work, specifically though the medium of significant plays. At a time when many theatre groups have neglected the spoken word in favour of an overly ‘physical’ stylization of acting, inspired by the Third Theatre acting idiom of Badal Sircar, it is reassuring to see the importance given to dramatic literature by Subbanna and his associates. This is, perhaps, unavoidable for a man who has been responsible for publishing some of the most major writers in Karnataka, notably, Shivaram Karanth, Adiga, Ananthamurthy, Kambar and Lankesh, in addition to the Natyasastra, books on ecology, film history and children’s literature. His publishing company, the Akshara Prakashan, may not be officially affiliated to Ninasam, but it is one of Subbanna’s parallel activities that he has sustained despite the increasing demands of the publishing world. So emphatic is Subbanna’s faith in literature, in the dramatic text, that Ninasam may be criticized for its relative lack of exploration in the areas of street theatre and agit-prop improvization. Even when it has conducted workshops with ‘underprivileged communities’, it invariably focuses on a text that leads to a production. With the local Harijan community in Heggodu, the

232 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

director Jayateertha Joshi worked on adaptations of two stories—Marikondavaru (People who have Sold Themselves) by Devanoor Mahadeva, and Premchand’s Kafan. Likewise, when Akshara worked with a group of factory workers in Davangere, who were sponsored by a CPI union, he chose to work on Brecht’s The Mother, even though his actors would have greatly preferred a costume drama. It is always a risk to give workers a form of ‘art’ that is not readily accessible to them, but it can be equally dangerous to provide them with what is commercially viable. On the one hand, one risks condescension in making them do ‘serious’ theatre, but one can be even more condescending if one assumes that they are inacapable of understanding anything apart from commercial stereotypes. Though Akshara faced problems with The Mother—he candidly admits that the songs kept the production going—he persisted in doing Brecht with the workers rather than switch over to a more popular play. In this regard, one realizes that Ninasam does not allow its choices to be determined by what is immediately accessible. It realizes that the learning process in theatre involves resistances which need to be confronted, and ultimately surmounted. The most ambitious production that Ninasam has ever undertaken with an ‘underprivileged community’ was an adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart with the Siddhi community near Manchikeri. Here we find an historic example of how an established work of literture (by a Nigerian author, in this particular case) was adapted by an ‘illiterate’ community to address their own needs and situation. In Achebe’s classic, we find one of the purest depictions of enforced assimilation, which leads to the gradual surrender of the Obi tribe to the laws of the ‘white man’. The hero, Okonkwo, commits suicide to avoid imprisonment at the hands of his enemy. In his death, there is an affirmation of an ethos that his own people have lost. The Siddhi of Karnataka may not have disintegrated like the Obi tribe, but they are pitifully scattered in small forest settlements primarily in North Kanara. As the descendants of Negro slaves, who were brought to India by the Arabs, the Portuguese and the Dutch in successive trading missions, the Siddhi have lived outside of the mainstream of Indian society. Though they include Muslims, Christians and Hindus, their ethos as a community has been marginalized over the years. They remain more or less unknown even within their state, where they work as agricultural labourers or as domestic servants in the homes of landowners. Not much has changed in their social status from the time when the traveller Linschoten spoke of traders from Mozambique coming to India with ‘gold, ambergris, ebenhood, and Ivorie, and many slaves, both men and women, to do their filthiest and hardest labour’. The origins of the Siddhi living near Manchikeri remains mysterious even to themselves. While some of them speak of lost relatives in Goa, at least one of them confided in Jambe, the director of Things Fall Apart that The Indians came to Africa and brought us here by lorry’. It is a sad reality that this tribe should not be aware of its own brothers and sisters in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, not

RETURNING 233

to mention other parts of the world where peoples’ skins happen to be black. Needless to say, our government has done little to enhance any consciousness among the Siddhi of their tribal history, preferring to leave them in a state of ignorance. Ninasam’s association with the Siddhi began when Jambe was directing Antigone and a children’s play for a local amateur group in Manchikeri. There, for the first time, he saw the Siddhi barely making contact with the local people, keeping to themselves for the most part. Through a local organization, the Rajarajeshwari Vidya Samsthe, he was able to establish a closer contact with them, which eventually led to the production. Thirty-five Siddhi, including eleven women, volunteered to work on this unknown activity called ‘theatre’. Prior to Things Fall Apart, none of them had seen a play. Even the cinema was something of a rarity in their lives. In the entire group that volunteered to act, ranging from children aged 10 to middle-aged women, only two of the Siddhi had studied up to Class Seven. The rest were, quite literally, illiterate. Unable to read or write, the Siddhi had to be spoken the text of Things Fall Apart, which was prepared by Subbanna. The language of the production was Kannada, a second language with which the Siddhi are totally familiar, even though their own language is a mixture of Konkani and Marathi. Jambe found that the strongest medium of communication was song, through which most of the narrative was conveyed. In the absence of any description detailing the gradual process of rehearsals over a one-month period, it is not possible to determine the exact assimilation of the text by the Siddhi. It appears that the lines were read to them by Jambe, who then encouraged them to add their own rhythms and movements. If this seems like an essentially passive pedagogical process, where the director ‘fills’ the actors with his reading of the text, this is unfortunately representative of how most productions evolve in the contemporary Indian theatre. In fact, on talking to Jambe about the production, I could not help being struck by the fact that he did not differentiate the Siddhi from the other actors that he had worked with. Not once did he give the impression that the Siddhi were incapable of acting because they happened to be illiterate. As for passivity, he recalls his one dispute with the actors, when the Siddhi women refused to wear the costume that he had selected. Discussion was necessary before they were convinced of his decision. Judging from the vibrant soundtrack on tape that remains of the production, it is obvious that Things Fall Apart was not a simplistic, agit-prop piece. On the contrary, the narrative was ‘broken’ with songs, dances and dialogue. Perhaps more significant than the structure of the piece was its effect on the local community and the Siddhi themselves. Though one cannot expect social relationships to change overnight, it can be said with some accuracy that the production of Things Fall Apart altered a number of dominant prejudices relating to the Siddhi. For the first time in the memory of people, they were seen not as labourers (our contemporary euphemism for slaves), but as actors, people

234 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

capable of creating a world on stage. It is a testimony to the innate power of theatre that the Siddhi had to be seen on stage before they could be recognized more fully as human beings in their own right. Ten performances of the production were staged, not only in Manchikeri, but in Heggodu, Mysore and Banglore. It is difficult to say whether one should be shamed or moved by the fact that, at a time when we are ‘marching towards the twenty-first century’, many of the Siddhi had never left their own home. Unbelievably, some of them have never seen a train. From all reports that I have received of the individual performances, it appears that the Siddhi were not intimidated by their performances in the cities. On the contrary, they seem to have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It is no small matter that Kusuma, one of the actresses in the company, made a public statement regarding her involvement in the play. This appears to be the first time that a Siddhi woman from this area has addressed a non-Siddhi audience in public. Partly as a result of the production’s success, the government has at long last included the Siddhi among the ‘scheduled castes’. There is more public awareness about their needs. For instance, a hostel for Siddhi students has been opened in the town of Manchikeri, thereby facilitating the education of Siddhi youth. Obviously, one cannot be euphoric about these changes. Many landowners would prefer to keep the Siddhi under their control, and the Siddhi have no choice but to depend on them for their daily wages. Now there is an additional threat posed by some small-town middlemen, who are aware that the Siddhi are increasingly ‘representable’. There are also new tensions among the Siddhi themselves, for instance, after their participation in the Loka Utsav, where it appears that there were discrepancies relating to the distribution of money. Inevitably, when a deprived community faces the recognition of established structures, there are bound to be new resistances and sources of corruption. Change, as Subbanna often puts it, does not happen overnight. It is heartening to learn that there was a follow-up to Things Fall Apart, when Jambe returned to Manchikeri to stage Kakankote, a play that focuses on the resistance of a tribe to ministerial manipulations in the Mysore dynasty. In this amateur production, fifteen Siddhi volunteered their support, which enabled them to further explore the world of acting as well as to mix with other non-Siddhi actors in the company. This attempt to integrate racial communities within a locality is definitely a step in the right direction for future collaborations with the Siddhi. Perhaps, in the next venture, Jambe could initiate a different process of exploration so that the Siddhi could learn to direct themselves in plays of their own making. What was significant about their participation in Kakankote was that they volunteered to work without receiving any money. This decision proves that the theatre meant something to them that could not be equated with receiving a wage. For Things Fall Apart, they had been paid Rs 9 for each day’s rehearsal, which is the identical amount of money that they would have received for a day’s work in the fields. The same amount was paid to women and children, who would have

RETURNING 235

earned less had they worked on the fields. Jambe felt that it was essential to give the Siddhi the equivalent of their daily wages, because from his past experience, while working on a production with a fishing community in the village of Gangolli, he had learned how wrong it was to expect a working community to sacrifice their time in order to do a play. Conversely, he also realized that if insufficient time were devoted to a production, it was ultimately meaningless for him as well. Like a good theatre worker, he wanted to uphold certain standards. And yet, when the fishermen would come to rehearsal after a long day’s work, could he blame them if they had forgotten their lines? So, in order to enforce a certain discipline in the rehearsal process, and to ensure that the Siddhi were not losing economically by doing theatre, it was determined by Ninasam that they would be paid their daily wages as a fee. Rs 5 was paid to them at the end of each rehearsal, while the balance of Rs 4 was paid at the end of the production. According to Jambe, this withholding of some of the money was necessary in order to prevent any possibility of drop-outs after a few days’ work. Perhaps, this reveals an essentially urban and widespread prejudice that the Siddhi are a ‘lazy’ people, who cannot be relied upon to fulfil their obligations. More accurately, one could say that the thrust of their economy is not directed towards the acquisition of more wealth, but to the sharing of existing resources with the entire community. In their social ethos, as T.C.Palakshappa explains in his study of The Siddhi of North Kanara, excessive wealth does not find a place, because the Siddhi are content to earn enough to keep themselves alive. Perhaps, with such an attitude, it is not altogether surprising that the Siddhi volunteered to work on Kakankote without receiving a fee. The simple pleasure of doing theatre was good enough for them. The only controversy surrounding Things Fall Apart concerns the source of the funding. The wages of the Siddhi as well as the transportation costs and expenses for all ten performances of the production were provided by a grant from the Ford Foundation. This was part of a larger grant made to Ninasam Janaspandana, a two-year rural theatre and film project. The purpose of the project was to widen the scope of Ninasam’s activities beyond Heggodu to reach mass audiences in all the districts of Karnataka. Through numerous workshops and film appreciation courses with children, women’s organizations, ecology groups, factory workers, harijans, students, fishermen and agricultural labourers, it was Ninasam’s purpose to explore the possibilities of theatre and film with these communities, as well as to assist them in forming their own theatre groups and film societies. In a subsequent one-year grant from Ford, it is significant that Ninasam was able to set up six ‘resource centres’ in a number of small towns, where the basic technical equipment required in theatre (spotlights, speakers, etc.) could be shared with local groups on a cooperative basis. Perhaps the essential fact to stress is that Ninasam declined further assistance from Ford once its project was over. Having mobilized its activities, it was now able to concentrate on developing community support on a statewide basis. It might be argued, of course, that the grant has provided Ninasam with certain

236 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

fixtures that are essential to its ongoing work. For instance, Tirugata could not have supported itself if Ford had not provided a bus that enables the repertory actors to move from place to place with all their accompanying sets, lights and costumes. In addition, the Ford grant has enabled Ninasam to build a small library of 16 mm films, as well as to own a 16 mm projector, a slide projector, a duplicator, a tape recorder, and two typewriters, all of which are used constantly for Ninasam’s diverse activities. The subject of receiving foreign aid is undeniably problematic at a time when so many rural development groups are sprouting all over the country. One really doubts how much of this money is being used ‘for the people’. It is particularly suspicious when organizations are created for the specific purpose of ‘channellizing’ the money. In Ninasam’s case, it should be emphasized that the organization had been in existence for thirty-four years before it received the Ford grant. It is unlikely that Subbanna was going to deviate from his basic principles by accepting the money. He had lasted long enough in a small way to realize the value of money. More important, he knew how the money could be used most effectively for the growth of his organization. Certainly, one should not use Ninasam to justify the credibility of the Ford Foundation in India. Rather, one should emphasize that it is an exception to Ford’s numerous grants given to theatre groups and research organizations, many of which have failed to mobilize their activities. Invariably, the vast amounts of money received by these groups have been totally out of proportion with their existing needs and, more important, their perceptions of how the money can be used. In this regard, one should emphasize that the very idea of funding contradicts traditional concepts of patronage insofar as it assumes a more impersonal, almost corporate relationship between the giver and receiver of money. When our traditional performers received support from the temple authorities or the palace, or when our ‘folk’ performers relied on local chieftains and landlords for patronage, they were bound within an intrinsically feudal structure of values and modes of behaviour. They knew what they were prepared to give and what was expected of them. With Ford, the relationship is much less clear, and perhaps for that very reason fraught with suspicion. The old bogey of the CIA is inextricably linked to its philanthropy. A critical problem concerns Ford’s advocacy of ‘cultural preservation’. One might legitimately ask: why should an American organization want to ‘preserve’ us? And from what? The humanitarian rhetoric of ‘foundationese’ does not convince us with its concern for the Third World. Nor has Ford been helped in this regard by most of its grantees in the so-called research organizations, who have been ‘preserving’ our culture in the most mindless manner possible, documenting just about every ‘folk’ and ‘traditional’ art on the point of extinction. Unfortunately, most of their video films have been made by technicians who can scarcely hold a camera, still less understand that a traditional performance has a vastly different context from a wedding or conference. This trivial exploitation

RETURNING 237

of our cultural resources is only extended through grants that provide an easy access to cameras and other technical facilities. Equally questionable are Ford’s recent attempts to counter this situation through foreign expertise in developing the study of Indian folklore through workshops. No one can deny the need for ‘expertise’, but one must question the categories of thought and terminology that are used to subsume the multitudinous realities of Indian folklore within the confines of ‘international folkloristics’. Clearly, the intervention of the Ford Foundation in contemporary Indian culture is a critical subject, and one that necessitates an intensive study. All I wish to assert here is that if the Central Government could reconsider its annual grant of Rs 75 lakhs and above to the National School of Drama, along with its even larger grants sanctioned to the Zonal Centres, and distribute this money to theatre and cultural groups on a more equitable basis, there would be no need to consider a foreign grant. Ford would be redundant. Unfortunately, this is not the case. It is also somewhat unrealistic to assume that the poorly funded Departments of Culture of the respective State Governments would be able to match the budget of the Central Government. Besides, the meagre grants provided by ‘autonomous bodies’ like the Sangeet Natak Akademi are scarcely sufficient to cover the basic costs of a group. In this context, it becomes almost impossible for any organization to expand its activities without securing ‘foreign aid’. Instead of moralizing about grants, I believe that it is more pertinent to examine how the money is used. Funding needs to be contextualized within the specific history and needs of a group. Does the grant attenuate the energies of a group by making it dependent on a foreign organization, or does the money stimulate the group to maximize its resources and widen its range of activities? Is the group stronger once the grant is over, or has it lost its identity? In the specific instance of Ninasam, it does not appear that the Ford grant destroyed the ethos of the institution. Rather, the grant enabled Ninasam to acquire a statewise momentum in its activities. The most important factor that has enabled Ninasam to use the money effectively has been the clarity of its attitude to funding. More often than not, groups have been destroyed through their vacillations and doubts about receiving grants. Or else, they are secretly embarrassed about their dependency and seeming compromise of values. Some of our most intellectual research groups have used subtle ways to ‘divert’ funds into special programmes that are not directly linked to the institution’s activities. This is not the case with Ninasam that has openly publicized the Ninasam Janaspandana as a two-year Ford-funded project. The budget has been made available to journalists and all participants in Ninasam’s activities. About half of the Rs 10 lakh grant was spent on acquiring a bus, while Rs 2.75 lakhs was spent on the theatre programme, Rs 1.75 on the film unit and Rs 0.75 on the library. It is this directness in relation to funding that has enhanced Ninasam’s credibility. If Subbanna has accepted grants not only from Ford but from the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Ministry of Human Resources Development, he is

238 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

absolutely clear about why the money is needed. If the grant falls through, however, the important thing is that the work will go on, perhaps slowly, but inexorably. On the other hand, if the grant materializes, then the work is mobilized. It is one of Subbanna’s qualities as a leader that he knows exactly when the work should be mobilized, and when it should continue at a steady pace. He also believes that, at times, a particular kind of work should be stopped. Already, he is aware that Tirugata may not need to continue after three more years of work. Then it will be time for a different phase of activity, perhaps one in which Tirugata’s actors will base themselves in particular rural centres to build up local theatre groups. Always, in Subbanna’s case, it is the work that determines the means of support, not the support that creates the work. If the work can support itself through the active participation of its community, nothing could be better. Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly difficult for theatre to be supported entirely by a community, particularly if it wishes to experiment with new forms and structures. In the cities, in particular, most groups are barely able to cover their costs through ticket sales and advertisements in brochures. The rental of halls and publicity costs are very high. Television is also compelling people to stay at home, particularly on the weekends, when they can watch a surfeit of serials in a state of domestic somnolence. There is a general ennui that has entered the urban theatre scene in India, even in the more commercial theatres which are no longer able to compete with the inanity of Doordarshan. It is an old maxim that if the audiences no longer come to the theatre, then the theatre must go to the people. One of the primary reasons for the ennui of our theatre scene has to do with the almost claustrophobic insularity of most groups. To counter this situation, one is tempted to recommend that our urban actors should confront their predominantly middle-calss conditioning by seeking new audiences, not only in the less fashionable areas of their cities, but in small towns and villages as well. However, even if a group believes that this is necessary for its growth, the question still remains whether it can afford to travel and reach new audiences. In this context, it is surely ironic that our government should spend so much money in bringing our people together for utsavs in New Delhi, when within the boundaries of a state on a three-hour train ride, there are communities who have never had an opportunity to share their languages and individual cultures. Even the train ride for a thirty-member company, in addition to food and other production expenses, would cost more than the average group could afford. The sad reality is that this amount of money would be a pittance in relation to the budget for Apna Utsav, and other such political extravaganzas. But it is not likely to be received by theatre people who wish to confront the problem of ‘national integration’ within their own state. So what is the solution? Is it to continue performing in the cities for the same audiences, who are fast dwindling in numbers? Or do we accept along with Badal Sircar that actors from the cities can do theatre in the villages on

RETURNING 239

occasional weekends, when they are free from work? For Sircar, who totally rejects the idea of funding and even the necessity of selling tickets, theatre can be free only when it is rigorously ‘amateur’. In other words, the actors have to work from nine to five like everyone else (if they are lucky enough to have a job), and then do theatre in the evenings. One should add that this attitude does not represent a solution for many theatre workers today, who are in the process of questioning the old assumptions of ‘professionalism’ in the Indian theatre. One should also remember that it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that tickets were sold in the Indian theatre for the first time. Over the years, this ‘professionalism’ (which enabled artists to earn a living from theatre) became associated with ‘commercialism’, from which ‘group theatre’ and later ‘Third Theatre’ advocates like Sircar disassociated themselves. For some of our greatest contributors to the Indian theatre, who are technically amateurs, ‘professionalism’ meant being ‘serious’ about theatre, not earning a livelihood through it. However, with the increasing pressures of life and the lucrative possibilities of working on television, the old enthusiasm for amateur theatre, where one worked for nothing but the love of theatre, sustained through friendships, gossip and hot cups of tea, is becoming a thing of the past. Like everyone else, our theatre artists want to be paid for their work. This does not pose a problem in commercial cities like Bombay, where theatre houses like Shivaji Mandir can still attract audiences, three times a day, seven days a week. But in other cities and small towns, where the ruthlessly capitalist drive of ‘Bombay culture’ has yet to catch on, or be fully endorsed, theatre groups are becoming increasingly divided on the issue of money. In this confusing state of affairs, Sircar has always maintained a very clear stand: theatre can be free only when it dissociates itself from the larger economic system of our existing society. Though the rigour of his stand is commendable, one must question why theatre should be so differentiated from other social activities in life, where the earning and distribution of money are obligatory. Certainly, one needs to question the economic dependency of theatre on existing power structures—and as I have already indicated, the acceptance of a ‘foreign’ grant poses particular problems. But surely it is somewhat naive to separate theatre from the reality of money. In this context, the ‘poverty’ of the Third Theatre becomes less of a struggle than a cop-out, a strategic retreat from the commercialism of our times rather than a direct confrontation of its power. At this point, I should add that I am not belittling Sircar’s stand. It is something that he believes in, and more important, something that he practises. What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that there is very little possibility of his work acquiring the momentum or scale of a cultural movement. One cannot cross any of the dominant social, economic and political barriers by doing theatre in the villages on three-day journeys. Such interactions with underprivileged communities can be personally illuminating for the actors, even though they could also be exercises in self-deprecation and the romanticization

240 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

of rural life. Nothing significant is likely to change in our social situation at large without a more sustained interaction between our people in the cities and villages, who continue to be separated from one another. Despite the early attempts of IPTA to bridge the gap between urban and rural cultures, very little theatre work has been attempted since Independence to confront the rural—urban dichotomy of Indian culture. This may be our greatest failure, which is merely enhanced through the ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric of our ‘committed’ theatre workers, whose verbosity far exceeds their actions. When attempts have been made to consolidate the indigenous skills and energies of our villagers, as in the case of Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre, they have petrified into proscenium-bound spectacles, where it is Tanvir rather than the villagers who is the focus of attention, particularly in the curtain-calls where he always stands centre-stage. The reduction of our people to ‘folk material’ is about the only concrete consequence of the government’s response to the urban—rural dichotomy on the cultural front. It is unnecessary to elaborate on how the recent surfeit of utsavs, melas, festivals, in addition to the Republic Day Parade, have contributed to this reduction. The decontextualization of our rural-based performance traditions and their manufacturing into spectacles, are now made possible through a new infrastructure—the Zonal Centres, run by bureaucrats and IAS officers, who have increasing power to select, assemble, and distribute artists from the ‘centres’ to the Capital. Any criticism of this manoeuvring of ‘folk performers’ is frequently challenged through a devious argument: the intellectuals want to keep the ‘folk’ lost in oblivion, so that their purity can be maintained. Nothing could be further from the truth. Exposure, I would counter, is necessary for all artists, particularly our ‘traditional’ performers. But does it have to take place in front of the Eiffel Tower? Can our artists not perform for their own people in neighbouring cities and villages? Under the pretext of recognizing our ‘underprivileged’ performers, the government is using them for its own purposes. Festivals of India are mere backdrops for our politicians to discuss ‘crucial’ matters like the arms race. Culture is just an ‘extra’ thrown in to add a little bit of spice. When the Festival is over, the performers are forgotten. What happens to them when they return to their villages and how they are regarded by their own people, what happens to the ‘traditional form’ once it returns from its foreign sojourn, all these issues are of no concern to the government. What matters is the availability of the performers for the next official extravaganza. In this unfortunate scenario, where the village provides the basic material for consumption in the cities, both at home and abroad, it is positively stirring to see how Ninasam has reversed this trend. Instead of using rural resources for production in the cities, it has selected some of the finest examples of urban culture, and disseminated them to rural and mofussil audiences through the state. This dissemination would be somewhat arbitrary were it not for the fact that

RETURNING 241

Ninasam adapts its material to meet local needs (for instance, by providing a running translation and commentary on foreign films, and by using an adaptation of the company theatre idiom for its productions). The purpose is not to educate the illiterate with ‘high culture’, but to make available what has been denied to them, and in the process, question the very categorization of culture on an elitist basis. Certainly, one can see how Ninasam may have to further politicize its work in the future by dealing more specifically with local problems like caste oppression, communalism, religious superstition, without the mediation of foreign texts and films. While one welcomes its avoidance of revolutionary rhetoric, one can only hope that the idea of revolution will not be forgotten in its non-coercive conscientization of people. In addition, one also hopes that Ninasam will be able to incorporate the participation of actors and groups from other states. Already the foundation of some truly seminal work has commenced in its organization of a children’s workshop, involving children of different social classes from the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Such attempts clearly challenge assumptions of Ninasam’s alleged ‘regionalism’. Let us keep in mind that if its activities have been restricted to Karnataka, this is a rather large state, particularly when one considers Ninasam’s work in all the nineteen districts with people from all sections of society including the cities, the small towns, the villages and tribal regions. One can only hope that Ninasam’s principles will inspire similar organizations in different parts of India. One should not, of course, expect replicas of Ninasam, because the conditions for alternative structures are surely different in individual states. Certainly, the priorities will vary in a state like West Bengal, where the Marxist orientation of the political establishment will determine the future of ‘mass culture’, once it confronts its own centralization of culture formulated by the urban intelligentsia. So also, one can expect different responses to Ninasam in states like Kerala and Manipur, where the traditional arts have still retained a resilience that Yakshagana has lost, providing an ethos that withstands ‘contemporary’ experiments in theatrical forms and structures of work. One can never generalize about how alternatives can be shaped. Blueprints and prior models may not work in one’s immediate context. The important thing is to test one’s ideas of change through concrete work. Too much talk can result in stasis. Through the evolution of Ninasam, one learns the value of praxis, of making and disseminating works of art that are of some use to people. Its work reassures us that ‘culture’ continues to be that one essential substance that is still capable of bringing us together in India. While our politicians may fail to provide cohesion to our increasingly unstable unity, despite the rhetoric and desperate pleas for ‘national integration’, our culture in all its diversity and particularities can reinforce our mutual needs and connections. Ninasam is a living tribute to this faith in the integrative possibilities of our culture. It is difficult to say when its work will merge with the endeavours of similar institutions throughout India to form a national cultural movement. At the

242 NINASAM: A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE

moment, Ninasam seems somewhat isolated not merely in its location (which may be one of its strongest assets), but in the quiet, steady realization of its altogether unique vision. For the moment, let us rejoice in the fact that such an institution exists in India. What is, perhaps, an even greater source of joy is that Ninasam will not merely last. It will continue to grow.

Afterword

From a critique of interculturalism to an exploration of the intracultural possibilities of theatre culture in India, the essays in this book have ‘travelled’ across diverse cultures and continents over a twelve-year period. Today I continue to travel, but within the cultural specificities of India, where I am now permanently based. As I search for links through differences, probing the principles of translation in theatre, the intracultural dimensions of my work have acquired a primary significance. This is in contrast to most intercultural theorists functioning in the West today for whom the ‘intracultural’ relates to ‘the traditions of a single nation, which are very often almost forgotten or deformed, and have to be reconstructed’ (Pavis 1992, p. 20). Certainly, this is not the case in India, where within the boundaries of particular states, there are sharply differentiated cultures discriminated through specific languages, gestures, performance and epic traditions, that are neither ‘deformed’ nor archaic but alive in their own contexts. The fact is that while interculturalism has become something of a trend among certain circles in the Euro-American theatre, the intracultural dimensions of theatre work have not been adequately confronted. For my own part, it is becoming clearer to me that the priorities of inter/intraculturalism(s) are implicated within a larger historical process. Looking back on my work on Request Concert, I realize that while Manuel and I started off with an ‘intercultural theatre project’, what ultimately emerged was an investigation of different performance cultures in India whose relationships were more vital than the specific adaptations of Kroetz’s text. Whatever the nature of one’s work—whether it is intercultural or intracultural or both—the point is that one cannot separate a reflection of its modalities from the particular contradictions of the historical context in which the work is placed. No theory or critique of interculturalism can begin, to my mind, without confronting the politics of its location. And this, unfortunately, is what continues to elude most seekers of interculturalism who, in their pursuit of ‘pre-cultural’, ‘transcultural’ or ‘universal’ values and sources, imagine that interculturalism can transcend the particularities of history altogether. Not even Patrice Pavis is exempt from this tendency, though his views on interculturalism, recently collated and published in Theatre at the Crossroads of

244 AFTERWORD

Culture (1992), form one of the most authoritative and sophisticated analyses of the relationship between theatre and ‘other cultures’. It would be useful to question his theory at some length not only to clarify my own points of departure but to speculate on the larger questions that elude us, both in the East and West, about where we are ‘positioned’ in relation to each other. While there is much to admire in the ‘coherence’ of Pavis’s constructions and penchant for definitions, the discourse itself seems to neutralize the intense vulnerabilities and human dimensions of the intercultural encounter. This is epitomized in Pavis’s model for the transfer of cultures from the ‘source culture’ to ‘target culture’: an hour-glass. Not only is this image almost pedantically quaint, it totally restricts, to my mind, the larger dynamics of intercultural exchange. To imagine ‘grains of culture’ trickling through filters from one bowl to another and then collecting in particular formations and conglomerations at the bottom is just too neat a construction. The very containment of the image (which in psychoanalytical terms could be described as ‘anal’) is a sign of Pavis’s own need to order his discourse so relentlessly that he simply rules out the possibilities of doubts, ruptures, blockages or interruptions from infiltrating his discourse in any way. It is so perfectly sealed, almost closing out any dialogic possibility. It goes without saying that the real challenge in writing about interculturalism lies in figuring out the ‘inter’, the space in between polarities, the dynamics between different points and locations. One obvious problem with Pavis’s model is its unidirectionality with the ‘target culture’ acquiring the status of a ‘destination’. Though the hour-glass can certainly be inverted, it is assumed that this can (or should) be done only after the ‘grains of culture’ have settled at the bottom in new combinations. This implies a one-way traffic, totally contradicting the larger modalities of exchange which Pavis himself upholds. Ideally, interculturalism evokes a back-and-forth movement, suggesting the swing of a pendulum rather than a downward movement through the narrow trajectory of filters by which the ‘source culture’ is emptied while the ‘target culture’ is filled. This movement connotes a most repressive pedagogy that undermines the profound process of learning in any intercultural encounter, where it is the reciprocity rather than the separation of relations that matters, or at least, is worth aspiring towards. Another problem inherent in Pavis’s model is its assumption that the filters within the hour-glass are ‘put in place by the target culture and the observer’ (ibid., p. 4). In actuality, what this amounts to is that the very ‘regulation’ of the flow of cultures is determined entirely by the ‘target culture’. Though Pavis takes pains to refute Erika Fisher-Lichte’s premise that ‘the source culture and the target culture are one and the same thing, i.e. the culture’ (ibid., p. 21), the reality is that his own theory is almost entirely circumscribed by the priorities and codes of his own culture. Indeed, this is what determines his modus operandi for studying interculturalism in the first place through ‘situations of exchange in one direction from a source culture, a culture foreign to us (westerners) to a target

AFTERWORD 245

culture, western culture, in which the artists work and within which the target audience is situated’ (ibid., p. 7). Where then are the crossroads of intercultural traffic? Pavis’s theory is yet another ‘one-way street’ in which the sources of ‘other cultures’ are reduced to materials used strategically by ‘receptor-adapters’ of the ‘target culture’ for their specific purposes. This appropriation, which Pavis himself acknowledges at the levels of the ‘semiotic’, the ‘ideological’ and the ‘narratological’, has to be accountable, to my mind, in some way. If the ‘source culture’ is ultimately ‘re-elaborated’, transformed, ‘restored’, broken up, reconstituted and placed in an altogether different mise-en-scène intelligible to an audience from the ‘target culture’, then how do we view the ‘source culture’ in the first place? Though Eugenio Barba, for example, attempts to ‘let cultures be seen through cultures’ (ibid., p.178) — and I would regard him as the most rigorous and dedicated of seekers in the creation of Eurasian theatre—it is ‘easy enough’ (as Pavis himself admits) to discern the ‘foreign’ elements in this intercultural scenario. But what is much harder (for which Pavis does not account) is to assess how these ‘cultures diverge from their usual codification and norms’ (ibid., p. 178) as a result of the new mise-en-scène. This would necessitate some knowledge of what these ‘norms’ are in the first place. Otherwise how can one begin to perceive their deviations through ‘restored behaviour’? Once again I am compelled to raise the issue of accountability but from a different perspective. It is one thing for Patrice Pavis to see the classical Indian dancer, Sanjukta Panigrahi, in an intercultural theatre workshop on Faust from which he concludes that ‘due to its expressiveness in mime and attitude and its emotional exteriorization, the Indian tradition seems closer to the west than does the Japanese, and thus appears more “legible” to a western audience’ (ibid., p. 168). While there are some enormous cultural assumptions in these conjectures, I would simply hypothesize that my response to Panigrahi in that performance is not likely to be the same because of my different exposure to her traditional ‘codes’. Watching her perform drunken mudras with a bottle in her hand, for instance, would possibly suggest more ‘de-formation’ than ‘reformation’ from my cultural perspective. The point I am leading to is that one has to account for perceptual differences in any reading of intercultural performance. More specifically—and this is possibly what has contributed to the critical edge in my own writings on interculturalism—one has to acknowledge that within the ‘target audience’ there could be members from a ‘source culture’ who would read the so-called ‘reelaboration’ of their culture in a significantly different way from the way a ‘target audience’ is expected to read it. Interculturalism has to account for different ways of seeing, otherwise it is yet another homogenized practice. Another unacknowledged danger I sense in intercultural theory concerns its deference to the power of a particular director in shaping the meanings of ‘other cultures’ through his mise-en-scène. His vision provides the context for the representation of ‘other’ cultures. In this regard, Pavis’s valorization of the role

246 AFTERWORD

of ‘receptor-adapters’—‘“conducting elements” that facilitate the passage from one world to another’ (ibid., p. 17)—has to be questioned. It should be admitted, however, that Pavis has the grace to acknowledge that since these adapters are placed beside receptors from the ‘target culture’, they ‘necessarily have an ethnocentric position’. But, as he qualifies: ‘Conscious of this distorting perspective, they can relativize the discrepancy and make one aware of difference’ (ibid.). Intercultural theatre practice, in my experience at least, has been far less reflexive and self-critical. And even Barba’s work, which attempts so consciously to reveal the differences in intercultural meetings, is jeopardized, to my mind, by the sheer ‘violence’ of his mise-en-scène. Seemingly oblivious to its coercive implications, Pavis emphasizes how the appropriation of ‘foreign bodies’ into the ‘traditional codification’ of a performer results in a kind of ’“gestural graft” which she must tolerate without rejection’ (ibid., p. 164). Note the specific identification of ‘performer’ with ‘woman’: one of the slippages in Pavis’s discourse that alerts us to the sexual/sexist differences that have yet to be acknowledged sufficiently in intercultural theory. At no point are constructs like ‘gestural grafts’ opened up for criticism in Pavis’s discourse. Indeed, there is no acknowledgment of the performers being permitted to express any kind of dissent because it is assumed that they are always working in complicity with the director. Much more has to be questioned here in relation to the director’s authority to select, dissect, appropriate and reconfigurate different ‘body behaviours’ within the ‘fictional bodies’ of the performers. Without wanting to sound either ‘demagogic’ or ‘ridiculous’ (ibid., p. 179), as Pavis describes my allegedly misplaced ‘concern’ for the appropriation of nonwestern cultures by interculturalists, I would suggest that there is a very real danger of a ‘distorted’ behaviour emerging from so-called ‘restored behaviour’. And ‘distorted’ not just in relation to the ‘source culture’ but in relation to the bodies of the performers themselves. While I certainly do not equate interculturalist directors with ‘cunning western vampires’, I do not rule out the possibility of Frankensteins being created on the stage in the guise of ‘fictional bodies’. And by ‘Frankenstein’ I am not invoking monsters, but conglomerates made up of spare parts in a construction where the ‘human being’ in the actor is obliterated. At one level, this preoccupation with constructs like ‘restored behaviour’ is merely symptomatic of a much larger malaise of which Pavis himself laments: ‘Let us admit it… our western culture, be it modern or postmodern, is certainly tired’ (ibid., p. 8). There is a need on the part of the most inventive interculturalists to ‘fill a vacuum’ (ibid., p. 2). And, accurately, Pavis focuses on ‘sensuality’ as providing the primary stimulus for borrowings of non-western forms and traditions: ‘Faced with its own loss of flavour, sensuality, any link to reality at home, western culture reacts with the secular reflex of importing rejuvenating raw materials’ (ibid., p. 211).

AFTERWORD 247

And yet, sadly and tellingly, ‘sensuality’ cannot be transported or ‘restored’ through the use of raw materials from ‘other cultures’. When directors like Ariane Mnouchkine attempt to evoke self-conscious images of a phantasmagoric ‘India’, as in her production of Twelfth Night, the effect is so contrived and dated that it embodies the worst indulgences of ‘orientalism’ (ironically funded by a socialist government). The ‘India’ that Pavis saw in La Nuit des Rois through ‘the erotic painting, music punctuated by an eastern timbre, the languid and effeminate carriage of the men (the Duke)’–tantalizes me into confronting the cultural stereotypes that determine the meanings of intercultural scenarios. Judging from my own experience, I did not see ‘India’ in Mnouchkine’s spectacle; I saw ‘France’. At a more serious level, interculturalists have drawn on ‘pre-expressive’ principles to explore the primary energies of the body. In this regard, I have been privileged to observe the deeply intuitive explorations of non-verbalism and preexpressivity by two contemporary artists in India today—the dancer and choreographer, Chandralekha, on whom I have recently completed a book following up on the insights derived from Request Concert (described earlier), and the gifted director, H.Kanhailal, from Imphal, Manipur (Bharucha 1992, 1993). In the hours that I have spent observing the preparation of their performers through pure movements of the body, preceding the articulation of specific techniques or narratives, I have, nonetheless, been compelled to observe how these movements are grounded in particular rhythmic cycles that are linked, however unconsciously and tenuously, to ritual, work activity and basic ‘actions’ like sitting, walking, standing, stretching. Moreover, the pre-expressivity of the martial performers in Chandralekha’s group, for example, is qualitatively different in terms of tonality, texture, dynamics from that of Kanhailal’s actors, who are linked to their own martial tradition of Thang-ta. The point to be emphasized here is that there are different modes of pre-expressivity belonging to specific communities of artists that are differentiated through their subtle links to expressivities, histories, lives. To separate ‘pre-expressivity’ from ‘expressivity’ can only result in aridity, a reduction of a particular state of being to a tortured set of techniques, which is what I see in Barba’s practice, despite his eloquent theory. I should also add that actors trained almost exclusively in a pre-expressive mode, such as Kanhailal’s son, Tomba, with whom I have worked on an exploratory theatre piece entitled Prakriya (Process), which I will discuss later, have severe limitations when it comes to addressing the spoken word or narrative. While there is something undeniably arresting in the quality of his repose, his ‘energy’ falls apart when he opens his mouth. And it is through this limitation, I believe, that his acting method merely enhances the larger ‘culture of silence’ that has been thrust on Manipur, perpetuating the larger political repression of a particularly nuanced indigenous culture. The body-culture of any actor cannot be separated from the history in which it is placed and the larger processes of politicization to which it is compelled to

248 AFTERWORD

submit and resist. History, unfortunately, is precisely what interculturalists for the most part have tacitly avoided in their readings of ‘other cultures’. Even if Pavis does not necessarily share Francis Fukuyama’s conjectures about the ‘end of history’, there is still a degree of wish-fulfilment in the closing lines of his book in which he acknowledges that while ‘theatrical interculturalism does not escape the historical contradictions of our age’, it would, nonetheless, ‘like to put these contradictions in brackets for a moment’ (ibid., p. 212). Interculturalism, I believe, cannot afford to put history in brackets without reducing itself to an illusory indulgence. Indeed, the struggle of intercultural exchange lies precisely in working through these contradictions emerging from our distinct, yet related histories. While this makes for messy, and occasionally painful encounters, I, for one, cannot see it being actualized otherwise. This erasure of history is precisely what disturbed me about Brook’s Mahabharata and the endorsement it received from an international press of a ‘transcultural’ sensibility somehow transcending the contradictions of our times. The production, as I saw it, was not just a denial of my history, though that would seem to be the thrust of my essay on Brook’s production included in this book. Rather, it was an affirmation of an essentialized reading of history itself that is far too simplistic, if not politically regressive, to be valorized. And yet, Pavis himself seems to surrender to this essentialism in his almost unqualified praise of the production’s adaptation: This universalizing connection [of the production] and the echoes of humanity as a whole do not exclude an Indian rootedness, an accumulation of details—smells, clothing, music, voices—that suggest contemporary rural India. Hindu philosophy, which inspired the work, is thus filtered through the contemporary Indian public, which has assimilated the text to all the circumstances of its everyday life. (ibid., p. 192–3) There are deep problems here in the generality of the categories that Pavis endorses. What, for example, is ‘contemporary rural India’? ‘Eternal India’ is one thing—Indira Gandhi published a coffee-table book of photographs under this title—but ‘contemporary rural India’ is a more mystifying category. Where is it to be located? The reality is that there are many ‘rural Indias’ today: there is the rural fiefdom of the former Deputy Prime Minister of India, Devi Lal, in Haryana, which he has used as a base to support the rights of ‘poor farmers’ while establishing the vested interests of the rural elite; there is Subbanna’s ‘rural India’ in the village of Heggodu which I have discussed in this book; there are also ‘rural Indias’ that continue to be cut off from the eyes of the world through the most abject living conditions possible. To assume that Brook’s Mahabharata suggests an essence called ‘contemporary rural India’ through its ‘accumulation of details’ betrays a total abdication of critical responsibility in addressing what is ‘contemporary’ and ‘real’ both in theatre and the world.

AFTERWORD 249

Then, also, there is a problem with the use of totalizing categories to enhance Brook’s transcultural affinities to ‘the echoes of humanity as a whole’. At another point in the book we are told that ‘Brook takes into account all the potential artistic modellings of Indian civilization, but he integrates them into a vision of rural India, at once eternal and contemporary’ (ibid., p. 187). ‘All the potential artistic modellings of Indian civilization’: is this not stretching the limits of possibility? One could dismiss this rhetoric as part of a larger gurufication of Brook, but what is more disturbing is when these totalizing categories are applied to ‘Hindu philosophy’ itself: ‘Hindu philosophy, which inspired the work, is thus filtered through the contemporary Indian public, which has assimilated the text to all the circumstances of its everyday life’ (ibid., p. 193). I am not sure if Pavis has heard of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad which has been waging a fundamentalist battle in India, ostensibly over a mosque allegedly built on Sri Rama’s ‘birthplace’ in Ayodhya, but this is precisely what they would like to believe: the filtering of ‘Hindu philosophy’ through a monolith called the ‘contemporary Indian public’ which has assimilated one of the great Hindu epics to ‘all the circumstances of its everyday life’. I am acutely aware in this regard of how languages from other contexts (rather like ‘other cultures’) are echoed in our critical discourse at times without our knowledge. Moreover, the same piece of writing can have different political resonances at different points in time, even though the writing itself may not be consciously ‘political’. When I criticized Brook’s Mahabharata with some passion—and it is one of the most widely-read essays in this book—I wrote it not out of a need to attack Brook personally but to defend a certain idea of ‘territory’ against the encroachment of a particular kind of ethnocentric interculturalism that I saw working in complicity with a larger political system. Steeped as the essay is in a kind of post-colonial angst with a somewhat embarrassingly uninflected use of ‘we Indians’, the essay (as I see it today) is not so much an endorsement of ‘nationalism’ as it is caught between asserting cultural identity and self-respect in an increasingly embattled geopolitical situation where ‘interculturalists’ become ‘guests of the Government’. Today I see more or less the same scenario with ‘nationalism’ (as defined by the India state) and ‘interculturalism’ (enhanced through the recent invasion of the cable networks in India) more sharply implicated. But the immediacies of the realpolitik in India would compel me to problematize my position far more strategically than I did in my essay on Brook’s Mahabharata. For a start, I would have to be far more discriminating and self-analytical in my use of the pronoun ‘we’, which was used too emotionally and, at times, with a false empathy. More critically, I would have to differentiate the profound concept of itihasa from more recent Hindu fundamentalist readings of Indian history through constructs like bharatiya sanskriti (Indian culture) and rashtra (state). My position could also be strengthened through a greater emphasis on the variabilities of the Mahabharata, though it is obvious from my essay that Iravati Karve and Brook have different views on women and the world.

250 AFTERWORD

I mention these qualifications to emphasize the need for far greater vigilance in the representation of ‘other cultures’ (including those within our country). Certainly, I am not free from my own misrepresentations though I am trying to develop a new alertness to the politics of critical discourse, which seems particularly absent, to my mind, in much intercultural theory. At the same time, it is heartening to acknowledge the beginning of a new respect for the impurities and angularities of intercultural discourse and practice, which will definitely have to be problematized more sharply in the coming years than it was in the earlier, more euphoric writings on the subject. In this regard, the interventionist role of feminism cannot be stressed enough in dismantling essentialist categories and a priori assumptions of representation in theatre. Indeed, I often wonder if my own critical reflection on interculturalism could have ignited without the catalytic force of the Request Concert project. Though it was not cast in a feminist framework, the very challenge of representing women in ‘other’ cultures compelled me to re-examine the larger premises of interculturalism in relation to adaptation and performance. As I enter the specificities of indigenous cultures in India, most recently in Manipur where I created performance texts of Pebet and Memoirs of Africa, two of Kanhailal’s most memorable productions, I have become increasingly aware of the principles of translation underlying the very act of doing theatre in the multicultural/multilingual context of India. An entire book could be written on this subject, but suffice it to say for the moment that ‘translation in theatre’ (as opposed to ‘theatre in translation’) cannot be restricted to the confrontation of the written word. Nor does it merely involve actors ‘translating’ a character/ ideology/sensibility from one cultural context to another (which is what the Request Concert project had attempted). At its deepest level, ‘translation in theatre’ involves an entire process of delving into the inner lives of actors whose cultural context may be different from ours but to which we are linked through a shared history. Some of the potent possibilities (and risks) of ‘translation’ were crystallized for me during my recent work on Woyzeck at the Ninasam Theatre Institute in Heggodu. Briefly, what became clear to me was that ‘translation’ does not begin with the text; it begins with a ‘language’ that evolves between the director and the actors, with or without the mediation of an interpreter. Though this is a pretextual phase of exploration, it is not entirely pre-verbal, even if most of the exchanges are concretized through gestures, compositions, improvizations and silence. In one such improvization, which I had explored earlier in the context of The Tempest, also staged in Ninasam, I had set the ‘rules’ of a particular ‘game’ in which one person in the group invents a language while the others in the group continue to speak in their mother-tongue (which is Kannada for the actors at Heggodu). What emerged from this ‘game’ was a most painful and violent exposure of the dialectics of language and power. My actors were alerted to the

AFTERWORD 251

larger political dimensions of Caliban’s searingly powerful line: ‘You taught me language.’ For the later workshop on Woyzeck, I had no such purpose. The ‘game’ evolved out of the dynamics of what we were doing. But within moments, I saw what I had imagined was a colonial paradigm dissolving into an exteriorization of the ‘communal unconscious’—and by ‘communal’, of course, I am not referring to ‘community’ but to ‘communalism’ or ‘sectarianism’ which is one of the most divisive forces afflicting India today. To my horror, I saw the lone actor speaking the ‘non-language’ animalized, appropriated, mimicked, stepped on, brutalized—and I thought my actors were such lovely young people. But as their unconscious internalization of violence acquired increasingly vivid signs of the systematized differentiation by which communities are inferiorized in relation to each other, I also saw Woyzeck, This was the ‘other’ revelation. For the first time since my reading of this work of uncompromising genius, I knew not just why I had to do Woyzeck in India but what layers of my history are contained within the text of which my actors (at that time) were completely unaware. The ‘communal unconscious’ of my actors’ world (and my world) was somehow echoed in the ‘political unconscious’ of Woyzeck. This is just one concrete instance of how cultures (and languages) can get ‘translated’ at intracultural and intercultural levels. As a non-Kannada speaker I was able to explore another cultural context within India through the mediation of a ‘foreign’ text, which was itself translated from German into English into Kannada. Unlike the Request Concert project in which I had explored ‘other cultures’ within my country through gestures and silence, I am now beginning to explore the complexities of the spoken word. Before Woyzeck I had embarked on a different project called Prakriya (Process) which I now view as something of a detour in my theatrical journey. Conceptually, it was far more ambitious in its attempt to find a shared language between two actors of Indian origin who are, nonetheless ‘differentiated’ through different cultures, educations, social and economic backgrounds, languages and exposures to the world. In the bringing together of the multilingual, cosmopolitan, highly reflexive actress, Alaknanda Samarth (whose Kunti I have discussed earlier), and Kanhailal’s son, Tomba, who has had almost no exposure to cultures outside of Manipur and whose training in theatre is predominantly non-verbal, I was, perhaps, attempting some kind of interface between the ‘postmodern’ and the ‘pre-expressive’. I can see how these categories fit into the ‘intercultural scenario’ more excitingly than my work on Woyzeck. But what actually emerged in Prakriya after a very tortured rehearsal process was a rather self-conscious framework revolving around two distinct personae—the mythic character, Abhimanyu, from the Mahabharata played by Tomba in a predominantly non-verbal idiom; and Nina from Chekhov’s The Seagull, played by Alak in Hindi. The only motif connecting their fragmented narratives was the process of remembrance by which Abhimanyu remembers the secret overheard in his mother’s womb while

252 AFTERWORD

he is being killed in the labyrinthine military formation of the chakravyuha. Likewise, Nina’s memory of her first night as an actress in a play about the ‘end of the world’ is later recalled to Treplev whereupon she ‘flies away’ like a seagull. In both processes of memory, it is a moment in the past that activates the future. Interspersing these two distinct performances of two very different personae from colliding cultural contexts were ‘codas’ of silent movement which were improvized with Tomba and Alak tuning into each other’s discontinuous energies with a sustained stealth. Here one also had an opportunity to see the actors ‘transform’ from themselves into the ‘fictional bodies’ of their personae. Before these transformations materialized, however, there was a five-minute poorvaranga (introduction) in which I selected a passage from Peter Handke’s Kaspar in which the collision of grammatical tenses was interspersed in an oratario with Tomba chanting the lines in Manipuri with Alak ‘cutting’ them in English. Both voices dissolved into a mantra-like sound out of which Abhimanyu emerged. All of this sounds ‘fascinating’ (to use one of the most frequently heard responses to avant-garde work), but in a spirit of self-criticism, I would also have to admit that Prakriya was somewhat contrived and arid—precisely what I dislike in much intercultural experimentation. This is not to deny some extraordinary ‘moments of being’ in the production—Abhimanyu in the womb, Nina lost in dreams—but basically, the work itself was totally isolated not just from theatre culture in India (which could be viewed as a positive sign considering its moribund state), but from the larger currents and contradictions of the realities surrounding us. Today, I am increasingly convinced that theatre cannot exist with the illusion of placing the ‘historical contradictions’ of interculturalism ‘in brackets’, as Patrice Pavis would like to believe (Pavis 1992, p. 212). History is constantly intervening and interrupting our lives, both in theatre and the world. We may be jolted by these interruptions, but we have to learn how to face them, not by resorting to rituals (as designated in the Natyasastra) which Brahma prescribed to actors so that they could protect their performance space from the invasion of vighnas (obstacles). Obviously, we need our own secular defences which are likely to come not just from the art of the actor but from the consciousness that goes into the shaping of that art in the first place. Many years ago, in 1969 to be precise, long before I started to think about ‘interculturalism’, I remember listening to a piano recital of Brahms in a small concert hall in Calcutta. The pianist was a visiting German artist. It may seem strange but at that time I did not think that there was anything particularly ‘intercultural’ about being connected to western classical music in India. It was part of my own ‘cultural inheritance’, belonging as I do to the minority community of Parsees. But ‘1969’ is another matter, a different kind of contradiction: this was the year of intense political activity in India following a further split in the Communist Party and the emergence of the Naxalite

AFTERWORD 253

movement. It would not be an exaggeration to state that people were being killed on the streets; buses and trams burned; constables beheaded. And simultaneously, in one corner of the city, Brahms was being heard by an avid group of musiclovers. Suddenly, in the midst of a quiet intermezzo, a man dressed casually in a dhoti and crumpled shirt entered the auditorium. He looked as if he had just walked in from the street or nearby dhaba (tea-shop). You could almost smell the bidis on him. Instantly, the pianist stopped playing, his fingers frozen mid-phrase over the keyboard, and the entire audience turned their heads in the direction of the man, who casually walked up to the edge of the stage down the centre aisle, selected a seat, changed it noisily, and then sat down. At this point, we all turned our heads back in the direction of the stage while the intermezzo continued. There is much that can be read in this ‘interruption’. But this is where I would like to leave you to think about your own jolts in life, your own collisions of culture, the shock of these moments, the lessons learned from them, the transformations possible through them, to bring our theatre a little closer to the world, to those ‘historical contradictions’ that we can no longer avoid. As my theatrical journey extends beyond the boundaries of this book, I continue to search for what is real in theatre. REFERENCES Bharucha, Rustom (1992), The Theatre of Kanhailal: ‘Pebet’ and ‘Memoirs of Africa’ Calcutta: Seagull Books. —— (1993), Chandralekha: Woman/Dance/Resistance, New Delhi: Harper Collins. Pavis, Patrice, (1992), Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London and New York: Routledge.

254

Index

Abhinavagupta 44 Akropolis 20 Akshara, K.V. 226, 231 Alkazi, E. 200, 205, 207 Anand, Mulk Raj 197 Angika 136 Antigone 207, 232 Apocalypsis cum figuris 26, 41–3 Artaud, Antonin 1, 13–16, 38, 122 Ashtapadi attam 170 Ashton, Martha 203 Attakatha 177, 181 Autumn of the Patriarch, The 7, 229 Avatharam 173, 189–9 Awasthi, Suresh 205–7

Brook Peter 3, 34, 48, 68–87, 151, 153, 247–7 Burrakatha 199 Byrski, Marian 25 Calcutta Puppet Theatre 95, 98 Carrière, Jean-Claude 69, 71–2, 75, 77–9, 87 Chaikin, Joseph 48 Chakravyuha 208 Chandralekha 122–47, 152, 155, 246, 252 Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi 197 Chhau 15, 27, 37, 61, 84–5 Cieslak, Ryszard 43, 46, 80 Come! And the Day Will be Ours 67 Constant Prince, The 26, 41 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 1, 16–17 Craig, Gordon 1–2, 13, 16–21, 38 Croyden, Margaret 46–7

Banayuddham 173, 176, 179 Barba, Eugenio 2, 21, 36, 48, 54–67, 244–4 Baris 15, 56 15, 56 Barrucand, Victor 21 Basavanna 179 Bausch, Pina 104, 147 Bhagat, Puran 208–9 Bhagavad Gita 3, 71, 83 Bhakti 167–7, 174–9, 184, 188–8, 191 Bharat Bhawan 225 Bharat Natyam 2,5,21, 130–30, 133–6, 139, 141, 143, 147, 154, 230 Bharatiya Natya Sangha 205 Bhatt, Haridas 204 Bhattatiri, Meppattur Narayan 180, 191 Bhavai 197, 199–200 Bose Buddhadeva 78, 80, 87 Brecht, Bertolt 151, 169, 183, 229, 231

Deshpande, Arvind 113 Deshpande, Sulabha 113–26 Devarattam 207 Dionysus in ‘69 32 Dr Faustus 26 Dutt, Utpal 229 Ezhutachan, Tunchat 180 Flaszen, Ludwik 22 Fo, Dario 56–7 Ford Foundation, The 234–5 Gandhi, Dina 199–200 Gandhi, Mahatma 224 255

256 INDEX

Ganguli, Usha 94–110 Gautier, Theophile 21, 38 Geertz, Clifford 31, 152–1, 156 Gito Govinda 168, 186 Glass, Philip 3 Grotowski Jerzy 2,13, 15, 20–7, 38, 41–53, 61, 81 Gubbi Theatre 193, 225 Guha, Probir 51, 85–6 Gurawski, Jerzy 22 Hamlet 30–2, 33 Heddayana 225 Hegde, Ramakrishna 225 Human Voice, The 211–12 Imphal, Imphal 207 Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA) 198–9, 225, 239 Jambe, C.R. 226, 232–2 Kabuki 15, 56–7, 207 Kafan 231 Kaikottikali 170 Kakankote 233–2 Kakar, Sudhir 71–2, 187–7 Kalaripayattu 3 Kalidasa 22, 25 Kaliyamardanam 173 Kamsavadha 173 Kanhailal, H. 246, 249 Kapur, Anuradha 167–7, 207 Karanth, B.V. 205, 225, 228 Karanth, Shivaram 201–4, 226, 230 Karim, Niniek L. 160 Karve, Iravati 78, 249 Kaspar 251 Kathakali 2–3, 13–15, 21, 24–25, 27, 33, 55, 57, 61, 74, 168, 177, 180–80, 207, 215, 230 Kebyar 35 Kecak 35 Keli 173 Kerala Kalamandalam 2, 21, 55 Koodiyattam 74, 143, 170 176–6, 179, 196, 207, 215

Krishnagithi 168–9, 191 Krishnalila 193 Krishnattam 6, 8 163, 167–91 Kroetz, Franz Xaver 4–5, 91–163 Kumbha Mela 28 Kunti 6, 211–19 Lakshminarayan, Udupi 131, 135–5, 140, 142–2, 147 L’Anneau de Cakuntala 21 La Nuit des Rois 246 Lebedeff, Herasim 3 Le Chariot de terre cuite 21 Legong 56 Linke, Suzanne 132, 147 Living Theatre, The 31, 37, 45 Lokadharmi 57, 61, 143, 170, 178, 181–2, 190–90, 219 Lower Depths, The 227–7 Lugne-Poe, Aurelien 21, 38 Lutgenhorst, Manuel 4, 91–3, 94–110, 115, 122–3, 129–41, 151, 153–4, 159–60, 242 Macbeth 227–7 Mahabharata 3, 6, 68–87, 151, 153, 208– 9, 219 Manavedan 168–9, 179–9, 185, 247–7 Marceau, Marcel 23 Marikondavaru 231 Marriage with God 61 Mattavilasa 179 Meduri, Avanthi 85–6 Melapaddam 177 Mena Gurjari 200 Menon, Chelnat Achyutha 198 Meyerhold, V. 23, 92 Min Fars Hus 61 Miss Sadarame 228 Mitra, Sombhu 197 Mnouchkine, Ariane 246 Mother Courage 31 Mrichakatika 21, 227, 229 Mudiyettu 170 Nabanna 199, 225 Nambutiri, Poontanam 180, 191

INDEX 257

Nandi 22 National Centre for the Performing Arts 225 National School of Drama 225–4, 236 Natyadharmi 57–8, 61, 143, 170, 182, 190– 90, 219 Natyasastra 22,57, 71,141, 167, 191, 207– 7, 213, 215, 230 Nautanki 199 Neeli Kudure 228 Ninasam 7–9, 163, 221–39, 249–8 Nirvahana 176 Noh 13–15, 41, 56, 143, 207 Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium 2, 65 Oberammergau 31 Oblensky, Chloe 83 Odin Teatret 54–5, 61–6 Odissi 2, 56–7 Oida, Yoshi 80 Olivier, Laurence 30 Orghast 80, 83 Padamsee, Akbar 218 Panigrahi, Sanjukta 57, 244 Panjarashale 225 Pannikkar, K.N. 205–7 P’ansori 154–3 Parsee Theatre 193–4 Patarot, Helene 76 Patel, Dasharath 142 Pavis, Patrice 242–6, 251 Performance Group, The 31, 37 Pillai, G. Sankara 211, 216 Poetics, The 74, 213 Poochuttal 177, 188 Prakriya 246, 250–9 Purapaddu 177 Raghavan, V. 197 Rajagopalan 190 Ramanattam 207 Ramaswamy 205, 207 Ramayana 69–70, 193–4 Ramlila 2, 27–29, 31, 194–5, 207 Rasakreeda 172–2, 186–8 Rasmussen, Iben Nagel 61

Rendra 159 Reviving Theatre 109 Ronconi 48 Roy, Sarat Chandra 198 Sahni, Balraj 197, 200 Samarth, Alaknanda 6, 211–19, 250–9 Samsa 229 Samudaya 229 Sangeet Natak Akademi 197, 205, 207, 227, 236–5 Sarabhai Mallika 69, 79–80 Satyagraha 3 Schechner, Richard 2, 13–13, 26–40, 81, 85, 157–6 Seagull, The 251 Seton, Marie 223 Shah Jahan 225 Shahani, Kumar 6, 211–18 Shakuntala 3, 18, 21–5, 26, 215, 229–8 Shankaracharya 174–4 Shirin Farhad 193 Sircar, Badal 37, 207, 230, 238–7 Sontag, Susan 13–15 Stanislavski, K. 23, 32, 226 Subbanna K.V. 221–5, 229–9, 233, 235, 237 Swargarohanam 173 Swayamvaram 173 Tagore, Rabindranath 224 Tairov, Alexander 22–4, 38 Tamasha 199 Tanvir, Habib 205, 239 Tempest, The 250 Thang-ta 246 Théâtre de L’Oeuvre 21 Theatre Laboratory 2, 21, 23, 25 Theatre of the Sources 2, 41, 50–1 Theatre of the Thirteen Rows 21–4, 53 Theru-k–koothu 207–8 Theyyam 196 Things Fall Apart 7, 231–32 Thiyam, Ratan 205–8 Thodayam 173 Tomba 246, 250–9 Topeng 56

258 INDEX

Turner, Victor 31, 51. 152 Tynan, Kenneth 34 Vilvamangalam 172, 180 Vivekananda, Swami 167, 175 Vividavadham 173, 178, 181–1 Wayang Kulit 15 Williams, Raymond 201, 210 Woyzeck 249–8 Yaksharanga 201–5 Yoga 2–3, 21, 24–6, 136 Zarrilli, Phillip 84–5