ONE of Lenin’s most famous books is titled What is to be Done? Lenin himself borrowed the title from a novel by Cherneshevsky. The novel, published in 1863, is a call for a kind of ascetic radicalism in Russia at a difficult cusp as feudalism insisted on dying and capitalism refused to be born. Lenin’s book, a political tract, aims at explaining to workers the dangers of economism – the belief that economic demands by themselves, in the absence of a political programme, can bring about fundamental change in society. Decades after Lenin’s tract, Utpal Dutt chose the same title for his Sri Ram Memorial Lectures in Delhi, in which he made a fervent plea for a dynamic, popular, entertaining and political theatre. This is then an impressive and, one might add, intimidating lineage, and I will not pretend I belong there. Instead, in a gesture of both tribute and inversion, I chose to title this article ‘What is to be undone?’

The cliché goes that theatre has no future; it lives forever in the present. But the present, goes the other cliché, is itself born of the womb of the past. What I wish to do here is to reflect a bit on the early history of theatre in order to make some points about where we are today. In so doing, the examples I choose will be mostly from Marathi theatre about which I know a little. The intention is not to be panoramic or representative of every theatrical history; simply to elucidate some resonances from the past about our present.

In 1881, its inaugural year, the Marathi paper Kesari, established by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, published a piece by Vishnushastri Chiplunkar entitled Natake karavi ki karu naye? – Should one do theatre or not. Chiplunkar argued that those who wish our country to tread the ‘correct’ or ‘virtuous path’ (sumarg) should help shape and stabilize the mind of the people, since like mercury, the human mind too needs to be stabilized; if not engaged in ‘good’ or ‘proper’ entertainment it will stray. Naturally, then, he condemned the tamasha and lalit as being low and vulgar forms of theatre. This was hardly the first time such sentiments were being expressed. Even a play like Kirloskar’s ‘Shakuntal’, the first Marathi sangeet-natak, provoked controversy when it opened in 1880.

With our modernity coming into its own, the question now was: does theatre without a political purpose have any right to exist? For the theatre practitioner of our times, this may appear a rather strange question. But the past is a foreign country, and they spoke a different language there. What appears to us as signifying a terrible colonial authoritarianism could simply be an effort to grapple with the very difficult questions that the colonial encounter posed for a subject people as they embarked on their own quite complex (and often contradictory) transition to modernity. During the colonial period, journals and periodicals were full of writing that expressed a certain anxiety about theatre and its social role. This anxiety was not purely ‘political’, but had something to say about dramatic forms. Incidentally after Independence, there is a noticeable shift away from social and political criticism to what might be called theoretical and speculative criticism.

 

The careers of modernity, nationalism and theatre in Maharashtra are intricately interwoven, and developed in response to India’s increasing integration in the world capitalist system through the coercive aegis of colonialism. In other words, modern Marathi theatre was, in its moment of birth, simultaneously nationalist and capitalist. In 1921, after Tilak’s death, when Gandhi sought to raise money for the Tilak Swarajya Fund, superstars Balgandharva and Keshavrao Bhosale (ordinarily with separate companies) came together to star in Khadilkar’s ‘Manapman’ in probably Marathi theatre’s most celebrated single performance, one which earned Rs 17,000. The theatre-nationalism joint venture was a successful one.

Modern Marathi theatre from its very birth was a commercial, capitalist enterprise implying that theatre over time became more and more an urban enterprise. The urbanity or urban base of modern Marathi theatre did not, however, mean what we automatically assume it to mean: that it developed in Bombay and Pune. Far from it. The father of modern Marathi theatre, Vishnudas Bhave, was based in Sangli. The other major company of his time operated from Ichalkaranji.

The first major Bombay-based company was the Amarchandvadikar Natak Mandali, established in 1855, a dozen years after Bhave’s pioneering efforts. By this time there were at least eight established companies all over Maharashtra, a number which went up to about 35 by 1879. The companies were based in towns like Kolhapur, Karad, Satara, Miraj, Belgaon and so on. We could call this the urban hinterland of modern Marathi theatre.

It is this urban hinterland that sustains Marathi commercial theatre to this day. Ask any actor who works on the professional stage and she will tell you that only about 25 to 30 per cent of performances take place in Bombay and Pune. The rest are in cities like Nagpur, Kolhapur, Solapur, Goa, Belgaon, Dharwad, Satara, Ichalkaranji and so on. When Shreeram Lagoo turned professional, he acted with the superstar of his day, Kashinath Ghanekar. At his peak, for his really huge hits, Ghanekar had teams in half a dozen cities who’d be ready to mount the play at short notice. This meant that Ghanekar himself was the only one who toured from town to town!

 

The fact of the matter is that theatre – whether professional or semi-professional, or amateur – is sustained by this urban hinterland. If we wish to build a vibrant theatre culture in India, it is this urban hinterland that we need to build and nurture. However, we do just the opposite; we valorize the metropolis and are disdainful of the hinterland. This attitude is internalized by our actors, directors and writers. If one is an actor in Begusarai, one wants to move to Patna. If one is an actor in Patna, one wants to move to Delhi. And if one is an actor in Delhi, one wants to move to Bombay! If theatre is to prosper, the lure of the metropolis needs to be undone.

The fact that modern Marathi theatre was a capitalist enterprise had another long-term implication. As ticketing became important theatre moved indoors – to playhouses under the proscenium arch. The elevated stage, the front and drop curtains and wings now served to separate audiences from performers. The stage was now lit, while the spectators sat in darkness. Within a span of about 25 years, all these innovations had become part of the Marathi stage. The first auditoria came up in Bombay (1842) and Pune (1854). Front curtains appear to have become common by about 1865. In 1873, the Kolhapurkar Mandali began to use ‘scenery’ curtains. Around this date, box scenes, made up of flats forming the back and sides as opposed to an open set consisting of backcloth and wings, were introduced in Bombay. Gas lighting was installed at the Grant Road Theatre in Bombay in 1866. At other places, kerosene lamps were introduced around 1875.

 

This meant, on the one hand, that the theatre became more and more a showcase for the actor. The modern techniques of stage design and lighting could focus on the actor and foreground him in ways that were hitherto unprecedented. The capitalist market, and these technical innovations, enabled the birth of the star system, which was entrenched by the early years of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the proscenium stage changed the nature of spectatorship. Vishnudas Bhave’s audiences around the middle of the nineteenth century used to exclaim aloud, advise the actors, cry out at the entry of the demon or even faint at his sight. Within a quarter century this had changed: the spectator-as-participant had been replaced by spectator-as-onlooker.

And yet, there is to date virtually no serious study on this subject. No one, at least in English, has traced the history of the proscenium in India, and related it to the history of capitalist growth, the cultural geography of our cities, the processes of inclusion and exclusion of various social groups in theatrical activity, the intervention of the state and its cultural institutions in building and running proscenium stage auditoria, the role of the private sector, the development of acting and writing styles, the history of experimentation within and without the proscenium stage, the economics of mounting plays in the available auditoria in our cities, the availability of alternate spaces, and so on.

 

Then there is the question of the ‘folk’. The Sangeet Natak Akademi organized a round table on the contemporary relevance of folk theatre in 1971. The impetus came from Suresh Awasthi, who had become Secretary of the Akademi in 1965 and who, along with Nemichandra Jain, was the chief ideologue of the ‘theatre of the roots’ movement.¹ Of course, the ideologue tends to be more puritanical than the practitioner, and the participants at the round table – Badal Sircar, Utpal Dutt, Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, Ebrahim Alkazi, to name a few – were more circumspect about adopting the ‘theatre of the roots’ slogan.

In the early 1980s, the Ford Foundation began funding projects to document the vanishing folk forms so that they could be used by contemporary theatrepersons in their work. The SNA in 1984 initiated an annual scheme to assist young directors to develop productions using stylistic conventions drawn from folk theatre. In 1992, the Ford Foundation initiated its Theatre Laboratory Project which sought to counter the growing regional chauvinism in India by encouraging close to a dozen theatre ‘laboratories’ to experiment with folk theatre. While the SNA’s folk thrust has been written about – though not adequately – I am not aware of a single book-length study of Ford’s interventions in theatre or in the area of culture more generally. Even Vasudha Dalmia’s recent work, Poetics, Plays and Performances, which discusses the SNA at some length in the section ‘The Nation and its "Folk",’ fails to make a single mention of Ford. I find this extraordinary.

I would like to emphasize two aspects of the SNA-Ford thrust. One, that it was essentially about urban theatre persons, more or less disconnected with the rural setting, groping for ‘authenticity’ in their theatre. Two, that the SNA-Ford thrust was deeply ideological and because it emphasized the formal aspects – the song and the dance, to put it unkindly – at the expense of the text, it resulted in a profound depoliticization. The fact that the SNA scheme was specifically for young theatre directors, indicates that there was a conscious effort to shape the future of Indian theatre along this depoliticized trajectory.

 

In the ’70s again, the ‘folk’ got entwined with ‘Brecht’. The reason one has to put the poor man in quotes is because by the time he was imported into India, Brecht bore little resemblance to the anti-fascist communist of the 1930s and ’40s. Here, in India, he was embraced by people who had little to do with Marxism, and even less with the communist movement – Vijaya Mehta, Ebrahim Alkazi, Amal Allana, to name some. Brecht became attractive for a whole range of reasons. Let me list a few of them, in no particular order of importance.

Brecht boosted our ego by admitting that he had borrowed heavily from the classical eastern theatre traditions – he was far more familiar with the Chinese than with the Indian, but we can let that pass. Brecht allowed us to sing and dance, which we love to do anyway, but with Brecht we could pretend that our own exoticisation of the folk was in fact avantgardist. More importantly, we could break away from the proscenium box set and the accompanying dramaturgy. As Alkazi put it: ‘Brecht… has broken away from the closed form of the well made three-act play… He has used such devices of our own ancient theatres as the narrator, the chorus, song, music and poetry, to bring back colour and vitality to the insipid prose theatre of today.’

 

All this happened at exactly the same time that the Ford Foundation and the SNA were promoting ‘folk’ and the Indian state was taking its first tentative steps towards globalization by organizing the famous ‘Festivals of India’ in various countries. The upshot of all this was a complete and thorough deradicalization of Brecht. To quote just one example from Amal Allana: ‘Although I had studied Brecht in detail before, I only now began to understand the validity of his approach. My previous work had been contentwise non-committal towards the audience, revealing more a concern for aesthetics.’ It is amazing, isn’t it, that in 1982, after she had spent two years at the Berliner Ensemble, come back to India and directed at least six Brecht productions, Allana could say, with disarming candidness, that her work had been ‘contentwise non-committal towards the audience.’

Now that government and foundation funding for it has receded, the ‘theatre of the roots’ movement has more or less run out of steam today. The roots themselves, the agrarian economy and social structure, too are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. Rural arts as a whole, not just theatre, cannot survive, let alone thrive, if the people that nourish it continue to die. The worst of it is that nobody seems to give a damn.

 

* Sudhanva Deshpande can be reached at deshsud@rediffmail.com

Footnote:

1. See Vasudha Dalmia, Poetics, Plays, and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 173-77. All the following quotes are from this book.