The problem

WRITING in the ‘On Stage’ issue of Seminar (April 1962), Habib Tanvir lamented the state of our theatre culture, ostensibly 2000 years old, which seeks to ‘revive all that is dead and gone,’ rather than ‘squeeze out of an old classic contemporary meaning for a contemporary audience.’ When not reviving the classical drama through productions ‘dead as mutton,’ theatre workers follow ‘the worst sort of naturalistic styles... inspired by films or borrowed mechanically from the West.’

Western theatre itself, though, was undergoing ‘a great crisis,’ namely, ‘the lack of playwrights who can hold the interest of the modern audience.’ The point is not to reject anything out of hand, be it the western naturalistic theatre, or the Indian classical theatre, or the rural theatre, but to try and achieve ‘a greater amalgamation’ of the various arts – music, dance, literature, painting, and so on – as well as of the various theatrical genres and traditions. ‘For inspiration, we can look anywhere and everywhere, provided we get the liberty to experiment and give ourselves a chance, using aesthetic balance and applying ourselves to the needs and dictates of our times.’ The main task, then, was ‘to provide a theatre which causes the young playwright to write plays on topical themes in new, indigenous and effective forms.’

These words could have been written today. In many ways, the problems of Indian theatre – or, to avoid being accused of foisting a metaidentity on a field so disparate, one should say the problems of theatre in India – remain the same. We are still casting our searchlights in the dark for the playwright who can write plays on topical themes in new, indigenous and effective forms.

Not that India hasn’t produced great playwrights. There was an efflorescence of play writing in India in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Playwrights such as Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi, Mohan Rakesh in Hindi, Badal Sircar and Utpal Dutt in Bengali, Chandrasekhar Kambar and Girish Karnad in Kannada did their best work in this time. Many of their plays were translated and performed in several languages within months, if not weeks. Directors like Satyadev Dubey and B.V. Karanth worked in multiple languages across different cities to stage productions that rapidly set the benchmark for Indian theatrical practice. Every new production from, say, Habib Tanvir’s Naya Theatre or Kanhailal’s company would travel across the country to several cities. The National School of Drama in Delhi did arguably its best work in this period. The Sangeet Natak Akademi was yet to become a white elephant.

This efflorescence lasted a surprisingly short while. Paradoxically, as means of travel and communication became faster and more accessible, theatre has tended to become more and more insular. Theatre enthusiasts in Calcutta are no longer familiar with what’s happening in Bombay; Bombay theatrewallahs have hardly a clue about the scene in Bangalore; Bangalore doesn’t show work from Delhi; and nobody gives a damn about Imphal anyway.

The institutional structure of Indian theatre remains skewed and deeply flawed. The premier institution for theatre, the National School of Drama, is a bloated behemoth with a budget that far, far outweighs either its needs or its output. In fact, it is shocking that the NSD alone commandeers more of the budget of the Department of Culture than the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the zonal cultural centres, and a dozen other bodies meant to promote theatre in the country.

There is a severe dearth of performance spaces that are well-designed, functional, have the basic equipment, and affordable. The last is the key requirement. Too many theatre groups fold up after some years of promising work simply because they are unable to financially sustain their work given hall rentals and advertising costs. Finding rehearsal space is a nightmare. A Prithvi Theatre in Bombay or a Ranga Shankara in Bangalore, theatre spaces run by managements that are committed to building a vibrant and sustainable theatre culture, seem like a boon precisely because there is nothing like them in other cities, or even more of them in their own cities. Corporate support, for the ordinary theatre group, is hard to get and harder still to retain.

There are, of course, new trends. We now have, for instance, plays without playwrights. Indeed, many plays are not even plays in the commonly understood sense of the term; they are what can be called ‘performance pieces’, most often evolved, not written, by the performer and director (if the two are separate). Often, such pieces are novel and energetic, and many of them use technology, particularly video projection, in innovative and interesting ways, even if sometimes the medium overpowers the message.

We still have plays by playwrights, of course. Though in many cases, playwrights are integral parts of the theatre group, and work in close association with the actors. The act of writing, in such cases, is more interactive. Actors improvise even as the writer writes, and the final play is the result of this collaboration between actors and the playwright.

New themes and new concerns are being expressed through theatre. Same sex relationships, the pervasiveness of violence in our lives, the twisting of our imaginations because of sectarian hatred, the encounter of the small town and the metropolis, the retelling of marginalized or forgotten histories – all these are themes the contemporary theatre is taking up.

Political theatre, in the sense of activist theatre, has proliferated. Some of it is artistically weak and no more than sloganeering, but some is startlingly creative and exciting. The form of the street play, in the hands of some practitioners, has taken on a complexity that was once thought impossible.

And so, miraculously, against all odds, theatre survives. Theatre in India happens anywhere and everywhere – in badly designed auditoria, in schools and colleges, in parks and gardens, in restaurants, on rooftops, in the open fields, on the streetcorner, even, sometimes, on moving trains. A neglected stepchild of the Indian arts, theatre has developed the cunning of the street kid – it forages around for morsels, it takes to any space available and makes it its home, it hoodwinks the cop and outsmarts the bully, and, in the hands of someone like Vijay Tendulkar, it is brazen, rude, outspoken, and blunt.

This issue of Seminar looks at some of the questions that emerge from theatre practice in India today.

AKSHARA K.V. and SUDHANVA DESHPANDE