Drama in Real Life

‘‘Gulab Bai was a pioneer,’’ says Delhi-based author, researcher and social activist Deepti Priya Mehrotra, 42. Her book, tentatively titled Gulab Bai: A Life in Nautanki, is scheduled to be published by Penguin later this year.

Mehrotra first heard of the artiste while documenting an NGO play on Nautanki in 1997. ‘‘Gulab Bai had died the previous year and Tripurari Sharma, the director and playwright, kept referring to her,’’ says Mehrotra. She found a sponsor for her research in the Indian Foundation for Arts and now Gulab Bai is ready to reclaim her place in the sun.

Central to Mehrotra’s narrative is the fascinating life of Gulab Bai. Born in the marginalised Bedia community of Madhya Pradesh in the early 1920s, Gulab Bai joined a Nautanki troupe in the mid-’30s after seeing a show at a fair. Within a couple of years, she was playing Laila and Taramati in travelling plays like Laila Majnu and Raja Harishchandra. And by the 1940s, she was successful enough to be earning Rs 3,000 per month, a huge sum in those days.

If Gulab Bai’s income was atypical of her kind, her love story followed an all too familiar trajectory. ‘‘Gulab Bai’s daughters Madhu and Asha Rani told me that she was the mistress of a seth in Kanauj. After he got involved elsewhere, his wife asked Gulab Bai to move out. She’s supposed to have told her, ‘I still have the tag of his wife, you don’t have anything.’ Gulab Bai felt very betrayed, and swore off men,’’ says Mehrotra.

In the larger context of the rise and fall of Nautanki, though, Gulab Bai’s story is merely an illustrative tool. ‘‘Apart from familiarising people outside Kanpur—the headquarters of the Nautanki in its heyday—with Gulab Bai, I want to clear misconceptions about the art form. Like the idea that all Nautanki artistes were prostitutes. Or that which survives today in Uttar Pradesh is anywhere close to the authentic Nautanki,’’ says Mehrotra.

A massively popular form of entertainment, education and communication, Nautanki dominated the Hindi heartland culturescape from the 1930s to the 1950s. By the time Gulab Bai set up her own troupe in the mid-50s, though, the decline had begun. Still, old-timers recollect her dadra Nadi Naare Na Jaon Shyam/Paiyan Padoon—as also her lobbying with the UP government for a pension for Nautanki artistes (the Sangeet Natak Akademi implemented it in the last decade).

Though Gulab Bai’s daughters, now in their 40s, are also Nautanki artistes, they would be the first to admit that the mahaul has changed beyond recognition. The demand today is for dancing girls, and veers dangerously close to prostitution. Hardly the reason to break into a song and dance.