It was clear that the audience needed a different set of skills to watch Ramu Ramanathan's Hindi play “Comrade Kumbhakarna” directed by Mohit Takalkar for the NSD Repertory, New Delhi. The play, intense and multi-layered, is full of signs and metaphors, weaving into its polyphonic narrative, mythology, politics and life as it were. For an audience that is used to straightforward storytelling, a rather post-modern mode of moving between ideas and time zones poses a challenge. Subverting the mythological character of Kumbhakarna, Ramu embarks on a search and pushes us into one as well.
Performed at the Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival, the play opens with Kumbhakarna (played brilliantly), of here and now, telling us the story of his life — his father's dead body lying there awaiting burial. He tells you of his twin sister who has committed suicide. His mother is an actor in a rural theatre group, and an expert in the oral tradition of the Ramayana. Father is inspired by Periyar's Self-Respect Movement and often complains to his wife, “there are more lights in your play – than in our life. You put halogens on stage — but there's darkness in the slums”. And mother often screams right back at him, “We need food in our stomach. Not ideas in your head.” His name, Kumbhakarna, also has a curious story – his mother decides to give him that name so that he can sleep through their poverty-stricken life and not ask for food.
Kumbhakarna, by his own admission, is an “unhindered and sincere pacifist”. Through him Ramu reviews mythology and by placing him simultaneously in the past and the present, he becomes someone who is capable of futuristic visions. As the officers interrogate him in the present for a crime that he has no clue of, he tells them about the mythical Kumbhakarna, as if he was his past: “Doesn't it seem odd to you, that a warrior who vanquished Yama-the god of death in battle, couldn't overcome sleep. Doesn't it strike you that maybe I accepted Brahma's curse, because it meant I wouldn't have to fight Ravana's battles for him, saar . When I was finally awakened, didn't anyone notice the delay I caused, whilst getting up. Moreover, when I was asked to take on Shri Rama by Ravana, don't you remember my words? They were the words of a pacifist.” He pleads with them not to see history as a linear process, and this ‘other' we constantly invoke could well be within us.
The play doesn't take place in an apolitical space. It doesn't exist in a state of no-emotion either. The pace and energy of the play is such that it doesn't pause to either sentimentalise or deliberate. In fact, even in the face of a grim life of despair, there is much laughter. The play breaks into Tamil every now and then, to debunk the “conspiracy of Hindi”. It uses elements of Kathakali, and has a rich use of folk music. An extremely good set of actors and a high-energy performance.
