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Journalism of Courage
In Delhi, where people speak the way they drive — fast, forcefully and without rules — Vyomesh Shukla, a poet and theatre director from Varanasi, stands out for the care he lavishes on words. His namashkar is stretched with meaning and he ends conversations with a profound pranam. His are the manners of Varanasi, the steeped-in-culture holy town by the Ganga that is the beating heart of the Hindu identity. It is unsurprising that the play that brings Shukla to the Bharat Rang Mahotsav, theatre festival of the National School of Drama in Delhi, is based on the Ramayana, the text that Varanasi’s poet-saint, Tulsidas, had translated into Avadhi as Ramcharitmanas.
Shukla’s play, Ram ki Shakti Puja, however, casts women in the roles of Ram and Lakshman, in defiance of the town’s living heritage of Ramlila in which only men participate. Less obvious is that both actors belong to the lower castes. “The story of Ram is traditional, yet I saw it as a post-modern text. The play, based on the poetry of Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, shows Ram as frustrated and unsure as he is unable to defeat Ravan. Vibhishan tells him that the Goddess Shakti is on Ravan’s side and Jambavan, a monkey warrior, advises him to hold a Shakti puja,” says Shukla.
The image of Ram as weak is complemented by a scene in which he prays to Hanuman rather than the other way round. The relationship between the master and the subaltern is inverted further when Hanuman is carried on the shoulders and set high above divinity. “The Sankat Mochan temple of Varanasi has a huge idol of Hanuman and smaller ones of Ram, Lakshman and Sita. I
realised that a small change in proportion gave an entirely new perspective to the narrative,” says Shukla, 36. He worked with amateurs — Swati Vishwarama who plays Ram was 17 when the play was staged five years ago — but Shukla says that it was the ethos of Varanasi that he was trying to, both, retain and rework. “The town, said to be poised on the trishul of Shiva, promises moksha or freedom from rebirth. People are gentle and without ambition or greed. They stay in houses their forefathers built 300 years ago, meet friends on the ghats, there is always music and bhaang and they are satisfied with jobs that earn them a little money. I wanted to retain this quality of simplicity in the play and yet make a disciplined production with modern tools,” says Shukla.
He crafted Ram ki Shakti Puja as a dance drama using Chhau, Kathak and Bharatanatyam and set it to the music of the Banaras gharana. The raw actors echo Ram’s vulnerability and his war against the mighty Ravan is mirrored by the audacity of Shukla’s small theatre group, called Roopvani, taking up the behemoth of the Ramayana. How the play, which was earlier performed to critical acclaim on the open grounds of IGNCA at sunset, will translate to the closed environs of Kamani auditorium remains to be seen.
He isn’t breaking tradition, says Shukla, but tweaking it. “When I study tradition, I find all the modern ideas contained within it. Tulsidas wrote about how to live with your parents, brothers and wife. I admit that the wife bit is problematic. Even then, the scriptures teach you how to coexist as a society,” he says.
After studying at Banaras Hindu University, Shukla joined Jawaharlal Nehru University for his MPhil course. “I was suffocated by a system that was based on protest. Must all poetry be about revolution?” says Shukla. He ran away from JNU and decided that his “fort would always be Varanasi”. “I think protest against tradition is necessary, but at the right time,” he adds.
His own poetry is fuelled by resistance. After working as a polling official for a leftist party and watching right-wing goons cast false votes for Muslims of the area, he began to write fiery verses. The poem Bahut Sare Sangharsh Sthaniya Reh Jate Hain marked his arrival as the new voice in Hindi poetry and he won the Bharat Bhushan Agrawal award in 2009. His collection of poems, Phir Bhi Kuch Log, remains his only one yet. “I was an avid reader of Mohan Rakesh’s play Ashad ka Ek Din, about Kalidas’s dilemma of choosing between love and prosperity. I don’t want to understand the intensity of the romance, but I loved the prose. I began to see poets as Kalidas, who sell out to material success,” he says.
In Kalidas’s dialogue to an injured deer, “We will live. One arrow cannot take our life. We will not die,” Shukla heard the voice of a trade union leader. His first major play, Ashad ka Ek Din, in 2011, had Kalidas dressed in jeans and a khadi kurta leading a trade union of a factory that had shut down after privatisation.
Since then, Shukla has created plays, such as Rashmirathi and Kamayini. His new production, staged in Bhopal on January 26, traces a folk tale about bamboo called Baasin Kanya or Satarupa. Working with a hundred performers, from school children to Gond and Baiga tribal dancers, he retells the story of seven brothers who kill their sister for her meat and blood. The highlight of the piece appears to be five tribal dances, from the Gendi, which is performed on stilts, to the Thatya, a dance by cattle grazers while they play their bamboo flutes. “Before a play, I am in shock. There are hundreds of questions. When it is done, I will understand. For now, I keep working,” he says.
The play will be staged on February 15 at Kamani auditorium
