An artist is not just someone who performs on stage or creates beautiful paintings or sculptures. Some of them live their lives much like the art they create. Take Jalabala Vaidya and Gopal Sharman, for instance. Looking at their home and work, we cannot find where art ends and life begins. While she is a stage actress, a director and a poet, he is a director, playwright, filmmaker and has written several television programmes. Carpentry and stone carving are also feathers in his cap.
In 1971 they began their own theatre. It is built into a part of their home in New Delhi and is called Akshara Theatre.
Sharman and Jalabala’s “The Ramayana” has performed in many theatres, including Broadway and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s World Theatre Season.
When they were young, Sharman used to write on performing arts for a newspaper to earn a living. He would also write stories and poems under the pen name, Nachiketas.
For many years, Jalabala with a magnificent voice and acting techniques would perform all the roles herself. Now, their grandchildren and students take on some of the roles — Hanuman, Rama, Kaikeyi, and so on.
Looking back“I didn’t earn much,” he continues, “and Jalabala and I lived in the garage of a house in Bengali Market. Imagine our surprise when the President’s Rolls Royce drew up at our garage one day. We were invited to a reading of my poems and stories arranged by the then President of India, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan at Rashtrapati Bhavan. I was so thrilled!”
Dr. Radhakrishnan wanted to share the stories and poems with a group of his distinguished and philosophical friends. “But there was a dreadful hitch,” recalls Sharman. “Only Jalabala’s name was on the invitation card as the reader! The poet and author had been left out — a clerical error. That was the start of our first theatrical piece, Full Circle. This production became a huge success in Europe.”
While Sharman was born and brought up in India, Jalabala grew up in London.
Her mother, the concert singer Marjorie Frank-Keyes, was half English and half Italian. Her father, Suresh Vaidya, was an Indian journalist, freedom fighter and author.
“I was a seven-year-old in London in 1944, near the end of the Second World War, and walked every morning to school,” recalls Jalabala.
“We lived in a block of flats, and on the other side of the street was a row of single family houses. Air raids happened every night, terribly frightening, with huge bangs and explosions. Also, it was the start of the V-2s, pilotless bombs that had a horrible sound, which would suddenly stop, and then plummet to the ground destroying everything they fell on.”
One day, a large trailer caravan was parked on her street. No one knew whose caravan it was. “Each morning as I set off, I would see one of the houses across the road would be bombed. It would be burning and its inside rooms all exposed, with pieces of furniture hanging off the edge of the destroyed floor. I used to run down the road. It was so awful to see those bombed houses. Then the caravan left, and in a couple of days, our road stopped being a nightly target. Much later we heard that the caravan was the secret office of the Chief of the British Armed Forces, General Montgomery, and the Germans were after him.”
Even today, 72 years later, says Jalabala, she cannot bear the sound of Deepavali firecrackers. “War is horrible and Deepavali fireworks imitate it,” she says.
Honour
Jalabala Vaidya and Gopal Sharman have received many awards for their work. These include the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Tagore Award, the Delhi Natya Sangh Award, the Andhra Pradesh Natya Akademi Honour and Honorary Citizenship of the City of Baltimore, USA. Sharman has also received the Homi Bhabha Fellowship Award
