How does an actor approach an emotion? The answer to this basic question is anything but simple, as one discovered during a conversation with Naseeruddin Shah. The master has just played a character struck with grief in Waiting . He plays Shiv, whose wife is in a coma. “You portray any emotion according to how you, as a person, would respond to that situation, I believe. First you have to surrender yourself at the feet of the character and then you have to see the tragedy from his point of view.”
So the reactions are of Shah? “Yes, reactions are mine. An actor’s job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being. So that every time he expresses grief or joy it doesn’t look the same. There are various shades of the same emotions inside us and an actor should know how to tap them.”
How? “By trying to believe in the situation. In this case, I had to bring all my feelings of love, gratitude and acknowledgement. The feelings that I have for my wife Ratna (Pathak Shah), I had to transfer them towards Suhasini (Suhasini Maniratnam plays his wife).” He makes it clear that he was not imagining Ratna while acting with Suhasini. “That would be wrong, dishonest. It is like thinking of your dog’s death while enacting a scene of your mother’s death on screen. You have to transfer your emotions and feel that she is my wife in an imaginary world.”
Does he do this all the time? “No, not in Welcome Back!” the small room fills with laughter. “But whenever there is some meat in the story, I try. From a young age I had this fascination for becoming the character.” One gets intrigued.
“As a student of theatre when I read Marlon Brando sat on a wheel chair for six months to play the role of a handicapped person, I felt I should also do this. There were similar stories of Daniel-Day Lewis and Robert De Niro. So when I got the role of a village man in Manthan and a zamindar’s role in Nishant , I tried hard to become the character. It is impossible. And whoever claims that he becomes the character is lying. And even if somebody becomes one, it’s not good for the film because then he will have his own life and he will not respond to the cues of the script, and director’s call for cut.”
That, however, didn’t stop Shah from trying to be as close to the character as possible. “During the shooting of Manthan I lived in the hut, learnt to make cow dung cakes and milk a buffalo. I would carry the buckets and serve the milk to the unit to get the physicality of the character. During Junoon, I spent a lot of time in turban with a sword by my side. I used to think this is the only way acting can be done on screen. Looking back, I can say it was important for me to do all that in those years as I reaped its rewards later.” And perhaps that’s why his performances in films like Sparsh and Masoom live on. “Along with Manthan , these were the films that took me close to a large number of audiences,” he reflects.
However, a few years later he worked with Dilip Kumar in Karma . “It was a very disappointing experience. In that school acting is like wrestling, where one actor’s job is to overthrow another actor. I found that belief offensive. It makes me angry. In films like Karma all the actors try to pull each other down, and coming from a collaborative art like theatre, I could not fit in.”
Over the years, he did realise that acting is not an end in itself. “Acting is one of the means, which is used by a medium to convey a point. There is nothing like overacting or underplaying. Had that been the case, a dance form like Kathakali would have been out of business.” Shah doesn’t subscribe to the notion that the actor is the centre of everything. “The film industry still thinks that you bring one actor and the film is made, which is also a fact, but I don’t subscribe to it.” According to him mainstream films are as bad as they were. “Photography and editing have improved but this doesn’t mean the quality of cinema has enhanced.”
Optimistic approach
The intolerance debate is no longer making headlines but the echoes of chauvinism are increasingly getting louder. “One is inclined to think like that but I refuse to be pessimistic. When the new government came I was not shattered or disappointed. I said they need to be given a chance. I can’t say that that I am over the moon with their achievements but I am not ready to lose faith. I still think they have an opportunity to prove themselves. The political opponents are accusing each other of dividing the country but I don’t think anybody can divide the emotions and hope to succeed. I think the leaders of the BJP know this.”
As for the censorship in creativity, Shah says this is not new. “We all remember what happened to Kissa Kursi Ka .”
A lot of hatred arise through social media where taking a stand means being called names. Shah says he doesn’t take the medium seriously. “I don’t know why people want to tell each other what they are doing or thinking at a particular point of time. It is a waste of time.”
Having said that he says he has great hope from this generation. “I can’t say about creative pursuits but as citizens they are better informed, and a lot more sensitive than we were.”
Creative urge
Shah was in the city to perform Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi stories on stage. Didn’t he remain away from Hindi theatre for far too long? “Aqal to aani thi,” he quips. “I was educated in English in school and college and so was Benjamin Gilani with whom I started Motley. It was when I met Satyadev Dubey that I discovered Hindi literature and felt the need to do something in my zubaan. Also, in Hindi there were only three plays, Andha Yug , Aadhe Adhure and the third I don’t even remember. So I started reading stories of Rajinder Singh Bedi, Sharad Joshi, Manto, Ismat Chugtai and Bhisham Sahni and turned them into plays.”
He says concepts like changing the world through theatre and theatre breeds in want are changing. “They are gradually diminishing but they are being replaced by a creative urge which I think is better than to have these sloganeering kind of plays. I am tried of the revolutionary songs of IPTA. It is time to develop the craft of playwriting in India. It could be political or social but the voice has to be Indian.”
