In December 2022, theatre director Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry first met the cast of her new play, Hayavadana, and saw that they were ready to start reading Girish Karnad’s classic text. Chowdhry dismissed the idea. They were not going to read, at least not in the beginning. They were going to do some fun things that would challenge the imagination and, then, move into areas that could not be easily imagined. For the next few weeks, the team went into unconventional paths and created a play that has come out of intuition and improvisations in music, movement, images and scenes, crowned with a lavish stage design by Delhi-based Deepan Sivaraman. Hayavadana premiered in Mumbai in January 2023 as part of Aadyam, an Aditya Birla initiative. In April, it was staged in Delhi. Hayavadana is among the first grand productions after the pandemic — and an enquiry into whether audiences are ready to pay to watch big shows. The play is now headed for Bengaluru, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. Chowdhry is back in Chandigarh, surrounded by books, recipes, old photographs and trees. The studio, where Hayavadana and other plays of The Company, Chowdhry’s group, are made, is attached to her house. It has a thatched roof and walls painted black during the pandemic. This is where Chowdhry comes with no plan and lets stories emerge through a process of trial and error. She had first watched Hayavadana when Satyadev Dubey, with a cast of Amol Palekar, Amrish Puri and Dina Pathak, had brought it to AIFACS in Delhi in 1974-5. Chowdhry was a student in the first year at the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi. “I found the idea of Padmini committing sati at the end very regressive. It didn't seem right to me that, at any age, a woman should commit sati,” says Chowdhry. In her adaptation, she has changed the ending of Karnad’s script to show an act of rebellion. She has also freely interpreted the music of BV Karanth, the theatre genius who was her friend and collaborator for many years. “I didn't feel that I had to treat it as a holy cow. I wanted to use new musical instruments and bring in certain musical patterns that are not part of the original,” she says. One of the defining theatre directors of the country, Chowdhry approaches dark subjects with a unique sense of imagination and lyricism, ending almost always with an image of hope. Before Hayavadan, she had not worked with a written script for 10 years, preferring to pursue the fragile truth contained in the minds and bodies of individual performers. Chowdhry was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2003 and the Padma Shri in 2011. The daughter of a doctor, whose family had migrated from Rawalpindi to Amritsar, and a home cook, who belonged to a Delhi household that was friends with the Nehrus and the Mountbattens, Chowdhry showed no early signs to mark her out as an artist. In her paternal grandfather’s gurudwara in Chandigarh, she cooked and ate at the community langar. In Delhi, it was a sweet world of charming people who played bridge and drank Scotch. It was in Chandigarh in the 1970s that Chowdhry first saw two plays by the formidable director Ebrahim Alkazi — Othello and Jasma Odan. “Uttara Baokar was doing the role of Jasma. I still remember her voice; it was so haunting and powerful. Alkazi came to our college, where I was studying Art History, to give a lecture and I was mesmerised by his personality,” she says. Alkazi was the Director of NSD, where Chowdhry enrolled in 1973. She moved to Bhopal in 1979, where she joined Rangmandal, the repertory of Bharat Bhavan, which was established by the Government of Madhya Pradesh. This is where Chowdhry began to work closely with Karanth. It was the time when the winds of change were blowing as Indian theatre struggled out of Western influences and owned its own impulses. Ratan Thiyam in Manipur, KN Panikkar in Kerala and Habib Tanvir in Chattisgarh were on the same quest. Karanth was working with master performers of Madhya Pradesh and the Nacha tradition, among others, as well as urban actors from small towns. In 1984, Chowdhry carried the methodology to Chandigarh, a new city that was rooted in the fractured history of Punjab. Partition and other political upheaval had disturbed the continuity of folk artists. Working with several traditional art forms, Chowdhry explored what it meant to her to be a Punjabi. Important texts got adapted to Punjabi settings, from Spanish Federico García’s Yerma to French dramatist Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot. In Hayavadan, Chowdhry intuitively used the bride groom’s sehra to decorate the head of the half-horse-half-man. Even when she worked with these great texts, Chowdhry would toss things around, putting certain scenes together, including a bit of imagination and editing out some parts. “I like to make the story identifiable for myself,” she says. By the 2010s, Chowdhry had begun moving away from text, to creating plays through improvisation, using material such as Sadat Hasan Manto’s writings. Bitter Fruit and Dark Borders are two of her Partition plays based on Manto’s stories. In February 2020, weeks before the pandemic closed down theatres, Chowdhry was staging Gumm Hai, a play about death, loss, grief and tenacity. It was the first play she was doing after the passing of her devoted husband, Pushvinder Chowdhry, a businessman with a fondness for the arts. Chowdhry was coping badly with his loss. Gumm Hai has a dark theme but the play rises to the embrace the spirit of tenacity through affirmations, songs, dances and sharing of stories. Hayavadana, which was offered to her by the arts organisation Bhoomija in Bengaluru, had all the elements that Chowdhry enjoys playing around with — metaphor, fantasy, a half-horse-half-man, inanimate objects dialoguing with each other like a Greek chorus. “There were many elements that allowed the imagination to go into any direction I wished and nothing was fixed,” she says. While Hayavadana was being performed, Chowdhry sat in the green room. She never watches her plays. “I had done my work and the play now belongs to the performers and the audiences while I completely vaporise as a ghost,” she says.
