Opinion India@75, Looking@100: Our theatre, our reflection

We are living in very particular times that demand a very specific response. No matter how many obstacles we may encounter, the only thing we have to avoid is despair, inertia or a failure of will. Art is not a better but an alternative existence, not an escape from reality, but an attempt to animate it.

India has always had a very strong theatre and storytelling tradition and, in the last 75 years, it has not only lasted — alongside the rising popularity of other media — but also become a reflection of a changing India. In the initial days after Independence, there was a need to assert what it means to be Indian. Yet India is not a monolith — its plurality comes from complex singularities.

Girish Karnad and Mohan Rakesh are two ends of the spectrum, both contributing to the formation of a sensibility that started defining Indian theatre. Karnad’s famous play Hayavadana merged tradition and modernity to tell a very contemporary and complex tale about gender, duality and identity. We had Badal Sircar, whose plays had an absurdist tinge, with influences from Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.

Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder talked about sexual violence, and Ghashiram Kotwal talked about corruption and lechery, bringing out topics that were previously unarticulated. A brilliant play like Andha Yug by Dharamvir Bharati, which was designed to be a radio play, turned into one of the most theatrically exciting and challenging plays on the Indian stage.

In the 1950s and 1960s, theatremakers and playwrights had access, through translation, to plays from different regions, but also to world literature. Each playwright, searching for a grammar and narrative to write, dipped into what they could access, according to their proclivities, politics, and emotional content. Through plays like Adhe Adhure by Mohan Rakesh and Nagamandala by Karnad, women were finally given a voice which defined their desire and confronted the male world in ways that were unprecedented. It was also the time of the great epic, the grand narrative.

Then, suddenly, something changed. Women started entering the theatre as directors and wanted to tell their own stories, not through the male gaze. Domestic spaces started being celebrated, washing, cooking and feeding became the leitmotif to tell stories that were personalised, with an assertion that the everyday can contain high tragedy and grand narratives. Shanta Gandhi’s Jasma Odan, a woman’s defiance of a feudal king and her triumph against all odds in the folk narrative tradition, became an instant sensation. Vijaya Mehta and Sheila Bhatia became iconic figures in the world of theatre. Waiting in the wings were Anamika Haksar, Anuradha Kapur, Maya Krishna Rao, Kirti Jain and many more who broke the glass ceiling and set a template of working in a way that was collaborative and defied linearity.

Even the most secular theatre had, at its core, a sort of public worship, the unspoken invisible dimension that gives theatre its special space. Traditions like Ram Lila and Koodiyattam bring us great stories from our intangible heritage. These divine rituals were a way to resolve anxieties and for communities to stay connected. The artist tried to stay alert to the space between uncertainties and conviction, between hope and hopelessness, between Eros and Thanatos.

Theatre is also about the audiences. And the magic of an actor performing live before an audience can only be experienced. There is that little invisible thread that is thrown by the actors from the stage into the audience, which binds people coming from different worlds into some kind of collective experience.

They may experience it differently, interpret it differently. Some may have come for the story, some for the aesthetics and some for the music — but they are all experiencing something together because theatre is about community.

Today actors are more focused, wishing to chisel their art through training of the body and mind, as they recognise that art is hard. It is also about uncertainty and failure and it’s about never losing heart. I recently did a huge production of Hayavadana for Aadyam, with actors from NSD, local actors, musicians and singers, most coming from varied worlds. I was really happy at their capacity to surrender. The spirit of learning and curiosity is in evidence as actors struggle to arrive at the core of their character. It’s a hard journey for everyone involved in this process, which can only happen through surrender and belief.

I am hopeful about the future. Our humanity is being tested everyday. We falter and fall, seeking hope and affirmation, while everything is in a slow dissolve before us. Each one of us is struggling to reaffirm our existence, our sense of being “alive” amidst a crumbling system. But art does not have an agenda or always a politics to argue — it explores a different kind of anarchy, raw vulnerabilities and systems.

The writer is a theatre director