In love with the Mahatma

Strap: Living in Mahatma Gandhi’s shadow, and subject to his experiments with truth, the spotlight doesn’t often turn towards Kasturba’s love story and thus remains a subject of intrigue

Rana Siddiqui Zaman

Love story of Mahatma Gandhi with Kasturba staged in Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai with many firsts, this week For the first time in any Indian or international theatre, a developing love bond between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his wife Kasturba was staged, tited “Dearest Bapu, Love Kasturba”, courtesy SaifHyderHasan, a playwright and theatre director. Well known for his love stories on stage between poets SahirLudhiyanvi and Amrita Pritam and actors Guru Dutt and GeetaDutt, Hasan has devised a unique way of narrating this tale “based on facts”. He turns the bonding of 60 years into letters exchanged between them – from the time of engagement at the age of seven, till their death, separately.

Ba was unlettered and Gandhi, an intellectual; Ba a housewife, Gandhi, a fighter within, a stubborn man with ‘highway or my way’ attitude; while Ba was “trained” to be a loyal wife with stories on Devi Anusuyya, Sita and Savitri, Mohandas experimented with a sex worker to test his wife’s “emotional fidelity” and confided in her breaking down, though Ba forgave him due to his honesty. All this and much more is emoted through the letters in which Ba addresses husband as ‘Bapu’ and heas ‘Kastur’. Ba chides, fights, protests, accuses and loves her spouse in her expressions, while Gandhi admits, submits and explains his side.

Hasan employs a visually intense stagecraft; a dark ambience with blue/ red lights criss-crossing white fumes, two podiums — on one Gandhi sits, on another Ba with her desk, white light spotting them, meticulously. Hundreds of pictures playing on digital screen of Gandhi’s struggle for Independence, separate the two speakers. The play is in English. Hasan justifies, “It’s also for international audiences and such profound emotional scenes even describing their conjugal lives, wasn’t coming to me in my own language.”

ArifZakaria, a theatre veteran who plays Gandhi, shocks and overawes with his looks and dialogue delivery. Like an admirer, I would say, ‘I am fortunate, I saw Gandhi in 2020 — live on stage’. Zakaria laughs at this compliment and explains, “Playing Gandhi was a yearning. We have seen Gandhi all our lives, so subconsciously he was always there in my mind. But I prepared for three months, l am anyway on the thinner side, lost some more weight. We avoided things like showing lisp in his speech that he developed in his last five years due to broken teeth. It would have caricatured him. There was this constant sense of responsibility for playing him in context of such content and physicality. He had frailness, yet a strong body language that had to fit in the entire scheme of things too. Stage is both an advantage and disadvantage on what will work on that day.”

ZeenatAman who returns to acting after 25 years, a first timer on stage with such a role as Ba, was just the opposite of her romantic, free thinker former Miss Asia-Pacific image. On stage, this Ba fires with faultless lines, reprimanding, fighting, admiring and declaring that she and Bapu “were equals”, both in age and relationship, in tone that was euphonic and in strength that defies her age (70). So despite slight accented English that she reads passionate and powerful letters in, she compels you to avoid it and concentrate on the fabulous content she emotes through.

“Returning with such a role has its own weightage. When Saif offered me the role, I asked, why me, he queried, why not you? Ba was so strong, played multiple roles, married so early, reared up children decently, forced to do things she wouldn’t, given a choice — cleaning toilets, observing abstinence at the whims of the Mahatma at a young age of 30, walking the walk with Gandhi ji in freedom movements, inspired women, was in jail with deteriorating health, undergoing emotional turmoil in her husband’s absence. Playing her wasn’t a cake walk. My heart pumped high. I meditated with deep breathing before entering the stage,” she minces no words.

She lets a small secret. “Ba always covered her head with a pallu. It was restricting my performance. So, I refused to take it.”

The play, worth a watch, is an emotional roller-coaster, story of almost every woman and yet only Ba’s! It will be in Chandigarh soon, promises Hasan.

Ends ArifZakaria, a theatre veteran who plays Gandhi, shocks and overawes with his looks and dialogue delivery. Like an admirer, I would say, ‘I am fortunate, I saw Gandhi in 2020 — live on stage’. Zakaria laughs at this compliment and explains, “Playing Gandhi was a yearning. We have seen Gandhi all our lives, so subconsciously he was always there in my mind. But I prepared for three months, l am anyway on the thinner side, lost some more weight. We avoided things like showing lisp in his speech that he developed in his last five years due to broken teeth. It would have caricatured him. There was this constant sense of responsibility for playing him in context of such content and physicality. He had frailness, yet a strong body language that had to fit in the entire scheme of things too. Stage is both an advantage and disadvantage on what will work on that day.”

ZeenatAman who returns to acting after 25 years, a first timer on stage with such a role as Ba, was just the opposite of her romantic, free thinker former Miss Asia-Pacific image. On stage, this Ba fires with faultless lines, reprimanding, fighting, admiring and declaring that she and Bapu “were equals”, both in age and relationship, in tone that was euphonic and in strength that defies her age (70). So despite slight accented English that she reads passionate and powerful letters in, she compels you to avoid it and concentrate on the fabulous content she emotes through.

“Returning with such a role has its own weightage. When Saif offered me the role, I asked, why me, he queried, why not you? Ba was so strong, played multiple roles, married so early, reared up children decently, forced to do things she wouldn’t, given a choice — cleaning toilets, observing abstinence at the whims of the Mahatma at a young age of 30, walking the walk with Gandhi ji in freedom movements, inspired women, was in jail with deteriorating health, undergoing emotional turmoil in her husband’s absence. Playing her wasn’t a cake walk. My heart pumped high. I meditated with deep breathing before entering the stage,” she minces no words.

She lets a small secret. “Ba always covered her head with a pallu. It was restricting my performance. So, I refused to take it.”

The play, worth a watch, is an emotional roller-coaster, story of almost every woman and yet only Ba’s! It will be in Chandigarh soon, promises Hasan.

ArifZakaria, a theatre veteran who plays Gandhi, shocks and overawes with his looks and dialogue delivery. Like an admirer, I would say, ‘I am fortunate, I saw Gandhi in 2020 — live on stage’. Zakaria laughs at this compliment and explains, “Playing Gandhi was a yearning. We have seen Gandhi all our lives, so subconsciously he was always there in my mind. But I prepared for three months, l am anyway on the thinner side, lost some more weight. We avoided things like showing lisp in his speech that he developed in his last five years due to broken teeth. It would have caricatured him. There was this constant sense of responsibility for playing him in context of such content and physicality. He had frailness, yet a strong body language that had to fit in the entire scheme of things too. Stage is both an advantage and disadvantage on what will work on that day.” ZeenatAman who returns to acting after 25 years, a first timer on stage with such a role as Ba, was jus