Stages of Punjabi theatre

When I shifted to Chandigarh in 1984, I went to a World Theatre Day lecture by a distinguished theatre critic, who, while delivering a paper on Indian culture, referred to Punjabi culture as the ‘Balle Balle’ culture, with a dismissive gesture of his hand. At that time, I made light of that jibe, but in retrospect, it really bothered me.

Punjabi culture lends itself very easily to a myth-making industry that dressed its reality in a way that the ‘copy’ became more real than the ‘original’. As a copy is always a distorted image of the real, a few exaggerated, larger-than-life qualities started getting associated with Punjabi theatre. As a theatre director, certain questions concerned me. First and foremost, the issue of language.

Punjabi, as spoken in Hindi films, is a gruff patois of pidgin Punjabi interspersed with juicy aphorisms. This became the gauge in the way the language was perceived. My mind resonated with verses from Guru Granth Sahib and songs from ‘Heer Ranjha’, ‘Sohni Mahiwal’ and ‘Sassi Punnu’ in Gurmukhi. How and when did this language and culture go through such an image distortion?

It was only in the 20th century that drama came to be written for the purpose of performance. Before that, what existed was an oral tradition of qissas (love stories), vars (heroic tales) and jangnamas (battle narratives). These oral traditions were full of verve, robust imagery and passionate poetry and were sung and enacted in the grand tradition of the strolling minstrels and balladeers.

Paradoxically, the genesis of modern Punjabi theatre started with an Irish woman, Norah Richards, who came to India in 1911 with her husband Philip Ernest, an Irish Unitarian minister. He had come to Lahore to teach English at Dyal Singh College. As an amateur actress, she had been associated with the Irish National Theatre in Dublin. In Lahore, she directed ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and its overwhelming success encouraged her to direct many more Shakespearean productions with her students.

This experience became a catalyst in stimulating Punjabi students to delve into their own myths and social issues, and garner from it an idiom that was local, vernacular and regional. Norah had given the students a new slogan — ‘Punjabi plays by Punjabi authors about Punjab for a Punjabi audience’.

In 1912, she initiated a competition of one-act plays, which gave an impetus to local writers to write plays that dealt with issues that were a part of their life. From this competition, two significant plays emerged: ‘Dulhan’ (‘The Bride’) by Ishwar Chander Nanda (1892-1965) and ‘Dina Marriage Procession’ by Rajendra Lal Sahni. These two plays, written in the realistic mode, had an evangelical zeal, which may seem outdated and irrelevant today, but were important milestones in the search for modern content in theatre performances

In a totally different register was the work of Sheila Bhatia (1916-2009). Her lyrical and operatic style musicals created a buzz that had the audience thronging to see her work. ‘Heer Ranjha’ (1956), a love story, and ‘Chann Badlaan Da’ (‘The Moon Behind the Cloud’, 1966) were a medley of Punjabi folk and wedding songs.

She also directed Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘Blood Wedding’ (‘Tere Mere Lekh’, 1984), Bulle Shah’s ‘Sulagde Darya’ (‘Burning Rivers’, 1987), all done in an operatic style. Even though her central characters were women, the woman’s voice did not assert itself or disturb the twin frames of patriarchy and feudalism.

She received considerable adulation in Delhi as her theatre resurrected a new identity politics amongst a Punjabi community fractured by its dislocation due to Partition. She also stood in direct contrast to the lewd but popular ‘Sapru House’ theatre, an unfortunately negative stereotype with which the name of the auditorium came to be linked. During the 1970s, their style of entertainment was buffoonery. These coarse and unsubtle productions with salacious titles appealed to the Punjabis who had relocated to Delhi after Partition.

In contrast, Bhatia offered them a return to the beauty of Punjabi poetry, music and the panoramic references to culture through anecdotal storytelling.

In 1974, the Department of Indian Theatre was established by Balwant Gargi (1916-2003) at Panjab University, Chandigarh. Concurrently, the Speech and Drama Department was set up by Surjit Singh Sethi (1928-1995) in Patiala. These two departments helped in freeing the Punjabi theatre from backwater aesthetics and provincialism as they brought in their work the spirit of experimentation and liberalisation.

Gargi’s ‘Lohakut’ (‘The Blacksmith’, 1944) touched upon the topic of female desire in a feudal and patriarchal context. Surjit Singh Sethi’s play ‘King Mirza Te Sapera’ (‘The King Mirza and the Snake Charmer, 1965) showed a fervent search for a new idiom and syntax that could accommodate the changing reality.

Tremors of change happened in 1976, when in a daring move, the Department of Culture, Punjab, set up a regional repertory with 30 actors. The brains behind this venture was a feisty IAS officer, Ravneet Kaur. Without any preconceived template, she managed to create a repertory in an attempt to take Punjabi theatre into uncharted directions. She was inclined to encourage diversity, invigorate theatre’s approach to classics, create conversations with the community, and expand the commitment to the commissioning of new projects.

Ram Gopal Bajaj, MK Raina and Balraj Pandit, trained at the National School of Drama, were invited to direct plays for the newly-created company. Before their accomplishments could be recognised or the institutional identity emerge, the repertory was dismantled. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that if the repertory had been allowed to stay, it would have changed the face of theatre in Punjab. Whatever the matrix of causes, it left behind a number of provocative questions that hovered over the theatrical horizon in Punjab. Within a year and a half, the repertory, which had burst like a constellation onto an arid landscape, died, leaving no epitaph behind.

The entry of Gursharan Singh (1929-2011) became one of the most significant chapters in the history of Punjabi theatre. This iconic father-figure with his revolutionary approach to theatre was a fearless activist. His was a theatre on carts, on trucks, in village squares, under a tree, on a street corner. It was a theatre of sweat and salt, a theatre of applause, a theatre viewed by thousands of people sitting under a blazing sun or watching under the night-light with the sort of passion reserved for religious functions or village fairs.

In 1964, he founded the Natak Kala Kendra in Amritsar, which has been the nursery for many Punjabi theatre actors and directors. His street theatre activities impacted Punjabi rural communities and inspired a generation of activist theatre workers, who spread the message of social change and civil rights to workers and students.

During the height of terrorism in Punjab in the 1980s, he continued to perform, regardless of the constant threats to his life. His most notable play was ‘Toya’ (‘Ditch’), a searing diatribe on man’s capacity to keep on digging his own ditch. ‘Kursiwala and Manjiwala’ (‘The Chairman and Cotman’) was a political assault on the prevalent dispensation, without euphemism or subterfuge. His agitprop theatre exercised a strong influence on the general public, who flocked to see his plays with fervour and passion. He worked under trying conditions and disregarded comfort or financial remunerations for a cause that he believed in.

Gursharan Singh, with his bold and evocative polemics, exposed the disruptive forces that were tearing the fabric of Punjab during the height of violence. His theatre was a battlefield which left one scarred and also healed. Uncompromising and brave, his theatre was an act of protest. On World Theatre Day (March 27), I salute the stalwarts on whose shoulders we stand. This is just a glimpse of Punjabi theatre, not the whole picture.

— The writer is a theatre director based in Chandigarh