Around the middle of the 19th century, Indian theatre suddenly went through a violent transformation; until then, plays were staged in the open air with little scenery, audiences did not have to pay for watching the performance, and the narratives presented were mostly from a stock of folk-tales or myths the audience was already familiar with.
This whole system got swept aside in the 1850s when there appeared, in the heart of Bombay, a theatre with a proscenium stage that, with the use of special stage lighting, music, fanciful costumes and a new aggressive style of acting, could purvey a magical world of fantastic narratives wrapped in stunning stage scenery. Theatre became a world capable of breaking down gender, class and caste barriers and immersing the heterogeneous Indian audience into a single dream world.
The ingredients of this new brand of entertainment were borrowed from the Victorian theatre companies visiting India, and they fundamentally altered not just the nature of Indian theatre but our notion of ‘Indian culture' itself. The key to this change lay in the fact that now the audiences had to - and were eager to - buy tickets to see a performance. Theatre became a business, a part of the market economy in which entertainment could be sold under competitive conditions no different from those pertaining to the sale of cotton or opium. In the past, individual shows had been sponsored by wealthy princes, landlords and temples while the performers had come from specific social classes and castes (considered low on the social scale) that looked upon providing entertainment as their caste vocation.
Open to anyone
Now, theatre became an economic activity open to anyone who had the money to invest or the talent to find employment. As business, theatre became respectable in the eyes of the urban middle class. Some of the earliest entrepreneurs were the Parsis of Bombay, adept at exploiting opportunities opened up by their colonial masters, so the new theatre became known as Parsi theatre. The Parsi theatre kept its doors open to anyone who could help it ensure safe returns on the money invested and thus drew into its vortex young men from different sections of society. The four life histories that form the core of this book amply illustrate the risks these men faced, the suffering they endured as well as the entirely new notions of glamour and celebrity which their success invested them with.
Two of them were writer-directors and the other two actors. Narayan Prasad ‘Betab' was the son of a poor sweet-maker who abandoned the folk forms he had learnt from his father to teach himself Urdu and write Ghazals but became a staunch Arya Samajist. The debut of his magnificent Mahabharata in 1913 ‘ was celebrated with Vedic rituals for fear that the strife-ridden epic would lead to disaster.' That didn't prevent it from becoming controversial because of the addition of an untouchable to the cast of characters.
Radheshyam Kathavachak, on the other hand, came from a family of traditional reciter-singers of Vaishnav tradition. His adaptation of Tulsidas provided the basis for Ramanand Sagar's sensationally successful television “Ramayana” more than half-a-century later. The two, independently of each other, initiated a fundamental shift in our cultural landscape from Urdu to Hindi, to the consolidation of Hindu values in the commercial set-up.
Jayashankar Sundari, as his name indicates, was an immensely popular ‘lady actor' and offers fascinating insights into the technical, social and emotional demands made on a man who had to morph into an idealised female character for his audience. Both he and Fida Husain, who became a rage in devotional roles such as Sudama and Narsi Mehta, came from very poor backgrounds, met stiff resistance from their families to the idea of going on stage but succeeded to a degree unimaginable when they started, financially and as cultural icons.
Their life histories are almost as spell-binding as the fantasies and magical narratives they helped to create on stage, and as one reads, one is continually aware that they provided the archetypes that would continue to shape the universe of entertainment when motion pictures swallowed up their world.
Kathryn Hansen, who is Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and has had a life-long involvement with theatre in Urdu and Hindi, has translated these four biographies into English, edited them and provided introductions and commentaries that are very valuable. Every now and then we sit up at a new bit of information about a world whose contours we have forgotten.
It is, for instance, hard for us to believe today that there was a time when a substantial section of the audience preferred to see female roles enacted by men rather than by women. Mahatma Gandhi, Madan Mohan Malaviya and others chose to patronise the New Alfred Theatrical Company, for instance, because it refused to employ actresses and was therefore considered morally hygienic.
Uncomfortable facts
Hansen's meticulous scholarship and her careful pursuit of the cultural contexts in which these texts were produced also bring to light some uncomfortable facts. In the last few years, the National School of Drama, New Delhi, has taken upon itself to reprint and, in some cases, commission translations of such historical documents and Hansen gently draws attention to the shabby scholarship that has marred these projects. About Radheshyam Kathavachak's autobiography, she says, “The republication by NSD (2004) has attracted a fairly large readership. Whether the family receives royalties from this edition is doubtful, insofar as there is no mention of the first edition on the copyright page.”
I was astounded to know that Jayashankar Sundari's famous autobiography was, in fact, ghost-written by two younger men. The preface to the Hindi translation of this book published by NSD (1989) — written by Anuradha Kapur, the present director of NSD — omits to mention this fact of multiple authorship, treats the text as written solely by Sundari and “the memoir is assimilated within Eurocentric norms of autobiography.” When Betab's memoirs were reprinted (2002) by NSD, ‘several errors were added'. Thus of the four autobiographies, only Master Fida Husain's Fifty Years in the Parsi Theatre emerges honestly for what it is, an oral history, recorded and published by Pratibha Agraval for the Natya Shodh Sansthan, Kolkata.
I have reason to dwell on this sorry tale of NSD and its treatment of valued texts at such length. The NSD commissioned an English translation of B.V.Karanth's memoirs (recorded in Kannada by Vaidehi), insisted on excisions in the text to ‘save embarrassment' to those around but then buried the project. Makarand Sathe, who was commissioned to edit a book of essays on Vijay Tendulkar, tells me that NSD has been sitting on his typescript for years and has, in recent months, simply stopped responding to his queries about its fate. One can only guess how many other such texts are sitting on the Director's (or her editor's) table, ‘awaiting attention'. It is a disgraceful state of affairs for our foremost national institution.
Hansen opens the book with a crisp history of the Parsi theatre. But it is her magisterial review of the critical literature on the ‘form' of autobiography and in particular of the significance of autobiographies written by theatre artists that poured out during this period, that makes this volume invaluable. Having just written my own autobiography (in Kannada), I found her analysis of the various attempts at defining ‘Indian autobiography', and, in the process, of arriving at an ‘Indian' notion of the Self, illuminating and provocative.
The book is a typical product of Permanent Black, beautifully designed, impeccably edited and a delight to hold and read.
Girish Karnad is a well known writer, playwright, actor and director.
Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies,Kathryn Hansen, Permanent Black, Rs. 750.
