"I am trying to create a tradition of my own"

THE Director of the National School of Drama, Ram Gopal Bajaj, speaking a few years ago on the contemporary Indian drama, remarked that, after Tagore’s Muktadhara and Dharm Vir Bharti’s Andha Yuga, if there is any Indian play that deserves a place among the international masterpieces of our century, it is a Kannada play, Agni Mattu Male, which Bajaj himself translated into Hindi as Agni aur Barkha. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Jnanapith Award for 1998 has gone to the creator of that magnum opus, Girish Karnad, who has to his credit the authorship of such great modern classics also as Yayati, Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Nagmandala and Tale-Danda.The hallmark of his art lies in the fact that although his themes involve an intricate interplay of mythology, history and legends, his works make telling comments on not only the human situation in general but also on the specific socio-political goings-on in India today.

Thus, if people hear in Yayati the echo of the generation gap, in Tughlaq, the decline of the protagonist’s idealism recalls to mind Nehru’s era, even as Basavanna’s fate at the hands of his disciples in Tale-Danda serves as an eloquent pointer to the communal and casteist trends in the contemporary Indian politics. Of course, his works have been produced by some of the greatest Indian directors, but Nagmandala had the unique distinction of being produced in Minneapolis, USA, at the Gutherie Theatre under the direction of Garland Wright. In fact, the production was so brilliant that Karnad was commissioned to write a special play for them and that turned out to be Agni Mattu Male.

Far from being an introvert, as most writers are, Girish Karnad enjoys the reputation of being an articulate thinker. In fact, he has been a man of many parts and a man of all seasons — a mathematician, a Rhodes scholar, a great performer on stage and screen, a TV compere, a filmmaker, and a cultural administrator who has headed such prestigious institutions as the Sangeet Natak Akademi in Delhi and the FTII at Pune. His stature in the Indian culture and his knowledge of the media at home and abroad lend to his views a touch of authority. Chaman Ahuja spoke to him recently. Excerpts:

For decades, theatre people in India have been talking about going back to roots — to ancient myths, to folk forms, to classical tradition; and a lot has been done, too. As that movement succeeded in forging a new identity for the Indian theatre, and how do you assess your role in it?

The discussion of the productions of my Tughlaq and Hayavadana were perhaps the starting point of that controversy. Anyway, I have written long enough and am now old enough not to worry about the identity problem. I write just what I feel like writing. As for that so-called movement, well, some good experiments did emerge here and there — a body of beautiful works like Ghasiram Kotwal, Andha Yuga, Jokumarswamy — but I wouldn’t say that all this gave birth to any specific tradition as such. Seen in terms of a tradition, I think we have no theatre. I have been trying to create a tradition of my own — as has Tendulkar.

At least this movement stemmed the onslaught of the realistic theatre of the West.

Now, even the West has given up realism. In fact, they are moving towards us. In America, for example, no one does Tennessee Williams’ kind of play any more.. Realism per se is more or less dead. His Three Tall Women is so different from the work of the person who had written Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In England, too, Osborne and his angry youngmen who dominated the kitchen-sink plays are long forgotten. When I was young, the domineering figure was Shaw, not so today. And who are their playwrights now? Dario Fo, who has won the Nobel Prize, comes from the clowning tradition of commedia dell’arte — not from the realistic tradition. Indeed, the cultural imperialism of the West need not bother us now. In fact, more and more, the playwrights are moving away from written plays towards theatre.

Isn’t that true of India as well?

We have never had any real tradition of playwriting at all; after Sanskrit plays, where are the texts? As for our folk theatre, it has been a tradition of performance, not of playwriting. Only the West has had a playwriting tradition, and that too now and then, off and on.

How about our Parsi theatre?

To have any value at all, drama must engage itself seriously with the contradictions that lie at the heart of the human situation in general and the society it addresses in particular. The Parsi theatre simply refused to acknowledge the very existence of any problems, existential or social. It had, therefore, no great drama. Its strength lay in music. When the talkies came to offer even better music, the companies just vanished.

Could we turn to Kalidasa or to Tagore for seeking the basis of our dramatic tradition?

The times have changed. Kalidasa to me appears too remote, too classical, too perfect. As for Tagore’s plays, they are rather pallied — exactly like the Shantiniketan School of painting where the figures are staid, two-dimensional and totally bloodless. It appears that today each one of us has to define his or her own tradition before any great tradition gets evolved eventually.

Any lessons from the West in this connection?

The only thing that I learnt from there was that the West had nothing for us. I think the western society being individualistic, western plays are hinged around individuals, while we in India define ourselves in relational terms.

Going by what has happened in the Indian theatre during the last few decades, we appear to be moving towards a semi-classical tradition. Does this appropriation of folk forms by the urban theatre imply any aesthetic risks or artistic compromises?

Well, after my Hayavadana, I found myself being invited to all sorts of seminars related to folk forms, and then I was offered Homi Bhabha Fellowship to work on the folk theatre of North Karnataka. It was all so educative for me and ultimately brought home the realisation that there was no difference between the folk and the classical drama: the aesthetic principles are the same. The basic thing, I discovered, is that the subject of any play has to be the human spirit. Using folk as a mere aesthetic device — with no further exploration of what it is to be human — does not attract me. It is not the question of garnishing the plays with music, colour and dance — that is how some of our playwrights have tried to cover up their sloppiness. Of course, folk forms do have certain intrinsic advantages. The folklorist framework subverts classical notions about our holy cows; through tongue-in-the cheek irony, folk tales make fun of rulers, priests, even gods — without offending even the puritans.

Do you think that the experiments in modernisation of myths, legends and history have yielded the desired results?

Whenever the re-location of the folk forms in the urban setting has worked, the results have been spectacular — in some of the works of Jabbar Patel, Chandrashekhar Kambar, Ratan Thiyam, B.V. Karanth, for example. But not always. The reason is that we have not been able to evolve an idiom of music for modern theatre. Our urban theatre has yet to find a way of expressing contemporary problems through musical forms — the way American musicals do.

Is there no way of reconciling the theatre of East and West into a new kind of realism?

European realism has become such a universal idiom that it is hard to imagine any other kind of relation. May be if we started rebuilding along new lines — that is, if, instead of the verbose, mind-oriented Shavian realism, we opted for the Chekhovian realism where mind, body and spirit coalesce, where silence speaks, where even inaction is a form of action.

What worries you most about the situation of theatre in India?

What worries me really is that there is no theatre — a theatre that may sustain a playwright and save him from drudging in films, bad serials, or whatever, to keep his body and soul together.

There is another thing about which no one is talking. For theatre there is no audience because, they say, it fighting a losing battle against television. I don’t agree there. It is not that people don’t want to see theatre; it is the problem of getting out in the evenings in most big cities.

In Bangalore, for example, the traffic situation is horrible. You don’t get autorickshaws easily; there is no dependable bus service, no local trains. Once people come back from work, they hate to go out again on their two-wheelers — with all that tension of driving, coupled with the pollution. One doesn’t mind spending Rs 35 on a ticket but when one has to shell out as much, or even more, to an autowallah while going and then again while coming, how many middle class people can afford that — and how often? In Calcutta, theatre is thriving because they have metro trains; in Bombay they have a train service and bus service in tandem.

As a playwright, are you not worried about the growing trend to underplay the role of the script — and to change the script in the name of interpretation?

I have no choice, There was a time when changes upset me but now I have learnt not to bother. Hayavadana and Nagmandala have been done so variously that I have come to see great virtue in directorial interpretations. I take it as a compliment that the same play of mine has the potential of yielding such diverse levels. When they were rehearsing Nagmandala for the Gutherie Theatre, they called me for discussion and the director, Garland Wright, asked me how he might do it. I said, do it as an American play — as an American director would do a Brecht or a Lorca for the American audiences. As you would never get the Indianness right, I said, don’t make it kitsch by putting a little sitar here and a little ghagra there.

So when Garland did it his own way, it was a different production — different form anything done here but great in its own way. So I just write without bothering about what might happen later. Maybe, I can make some fuss today, but what about tomorrow when I shall be no more to intervene. What can poor Shakespeare do about what the directors have been doing to his plays — at times mangling them beyond recognition?

And what about the interpretations of the theatre critics. Are they dependable?

If you invite a critic to come and review your play, it is his right to like it or not. But more often than not, I find our criticism vindicating Susan Sontag’s rather cynical remark that interpretation is the revenge of intellect on art. Anyway, I have learnt not to bother about critics too much. I struggle with my plays; I expect critics to struggle, too.