Directors Who Have Left A Distinct Mark On Indian Theatre

In Independent India, there were four theatre directors who more or less set the direction theatrical practices were to take in later years. They were Habib Tanvir of Chhattisgarh; B.V. Karanth of Karnataka; poet, dancer-guru and playwright Kavalam Narayana Panikkar of Kerala; and poet, novelist and architect Ratan Thiyam of Manipur. Of course, there were a few other directors, too, who made their distinct mark on Indian theatre such as H. Kanhailal of Manipur. All of them reinstated poetry in theatrical performances, bringing back to contemporary times the traditional ways of performing where theatre was imagined as the embodiment of poetry using movements, colours, sound textures, costumes, dialogues, etc. It kept prose-centered-drama at bay because this drama is much more verbose, (termed ‘talkative’ by the Chinese), and much less evocative. Another director I’d like to add to the line of these illustrious artists is young Rajendra Panchal.

Thiyam’s Theatre of Attention

Years ago, I published a book of conversations with Thiyam and called it Theatre of Grandeur. I thought that Thiyam’s theatre unfolds a mysterious grandeur before our eyes. At the time, I couldn’t see that grandeur in his theatre is a means for a completely different experience. The biggest causality of our smart city-times is attention. For the past many decades various mediums, including social media, TV programmes, mobile reels, etc. have successfully broken our attention span and more or less destroyed its depth. Lesser the span and the depth of attention, lesser the chances for people to create and experience themselves and the situations, political and otherwise, they are in.

In our age of spectacle, Thiyam’s was the theatre of attention which tried to expand the audience’s attention span and increase its depth. It did so through the configuration of colours, actors’ movements, musicality of enunciation and the magnificent texture of light on stage. These would unfold in a very slowed-down time and a potentially infinite space in such a way that the audience’s attention remained glued to it from beginning to end. With this freshly healed attention, the audience could feel the questions surrounding it a little more palpably. Sadly, Thiyam died this year but his repertory, Chorus, is very much alive in Imphal. Its new in-charge is the very talented director Thawai Thiyam who trained in Japan with the great Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki and Ratan Thiyam himself.

The Great K.N. Panikkar

K.N. Panikkar was the first director to bring the beauty of the Sanskrit theatre back to the contemporary Indian stage. His repertory Sopanam performed all the plays of the oldest Sanskrit playwright Bhasa and noted Sanskrit poets such as Kalidas and Bhavbhuti. Sopanam also staged plays written by him in Malayalam along with some plays in Hindi. His understanding of the folk and classical performative art forms of Kerala was profound. He took elements from various traditional dance and theatrical forms and used them to weave together his theatre. He would first try to decode the codes hidden in the persona of the characters and the dialogues of the Sanskrit plays and only then start imagining the flow of the play with actors, their movements, speech patterns, enunciation and silences. But the flow of his theatre came not just from the narrative but more from the inventive use of scales.

There are various scales in theatre: the scale of vachika or speech patterns, which potentially ranges from straightforward speech to song, was so beautifully used by Panikkar that the audience would begin to listen to the music in the simple dialogues and recitation in the folds of songs. He equally effectively used the scale of syntaxes of the placement of actors in relation to each other and the audience. In his theatre, he freely employed the whole range of such syntaxes from a purely realistic way where actors would face each other to highly imaginative ways like the ones found in Kerala’s dance-drama Kudiyattam, in which actors don’t look at one another when delivering dialogues. Their gaze is directed towards the flame that burns before them which represents the mind of the audience. Panikkar’s theatrical practices always respected the foundational fact of theatre: whatever one does on the stage evokes whatever happens in the mind.

Colonisation of religious traditions created many drawbacks. One big problem among them: all Sanskrit texts were erroneously taken to be religious and a certain of kind reading lead to their de-sensualisation and de-eroticisation. In his wonderful performances of Sanskrit plays, Panikkar re-sensualised and re-eroticised them, restoring their lost spirit. The erotic rasa, called shringar rasa, establishes the continuity between man and nature. This was the way that culture could get rid of homo-centricity which inevitably leads to the destruction of the environment and makes human life impossible.

Theatre of Reflection

Rajendra Panchal lives and works in Roteda village, Kota district, Rajasthan. He has developed a space for rehearsals called Ashram Perafin. He, in a sense, un-trains actors there in the techniques they may have learnt elsewhere that stop them from realising their inherent freedom which allows them to unleash their enormous energies on the stage. Panchal’s is the theatre of reflection. There are very few movements of the actors on the stage; there is no clear-cut flow of the narrative, yet, there in a flow on the stage, perhaps the flow of energies and thoughts, released from highly sensual colours, sound patterns, rhythms, etc.

In his production of a play based on the life of the great poet of Haroti, Sukavi Suryamalla, Panchal used a series of paintings (portraits) to evoke an alternative presence of the characters in the play that were already being enacted by the actors. This way, he provoked the audience to create their own Suryamalla and other characters of his times.

In another production, Panchal’s actors moved randomly and spoke nonsensical words delicately, suggestive of the Tower of Babel that the modern world with its information overload has turned into. Today, it is almost impossible for a person to understand what Wittgenstein called the “language games of others”.

In such innovative ways, Panchal’s theatre makes the audience move inwards and reflect on the human condition in our times.

(Views expressed are personal)

Udayan Vajpeyi is a poet & novelist whose novel Love Is Participation In Eternity has recently been published in English translation