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Of the many selves
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The play Bahumukhi tosses you between established notions of the real and the imagined
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Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.
CYCLICAL The final letdown for Kempe Gowda comes from Jakkuji, once an underdog himself
No individual can be judged in isolation of the forces of his times: social, political and economical. Hence, he is largely a product of a period, of history. If on the one hand, the individual is shaped by his reactions and resistances to the world
around him, his story is also his response to the pressures of survival within a system. “Bahumukhi”, Vivek Shanbhag’s play, staged as part of the Ranga Shankara festival by amateur theatre group Sanchaya and directed by S. Surendranath, deals with these preoccupations.
The play, pitting the individual in the backdrop of a wide, powerful canvas – strangleholds of institution, authority, power – raises itself to a universality, while it gains its rootedness by locating the individual in a phenomenon that’s true of our times – a hyperactive media that menacingly invades private spaces and parades human emotions in the marketplace, the nouveau rich and their fashionable engagement with market-savvy spiritual gurus, failed relationships, and the disappearing fences between truth and untruth.
It all begins with a journalist (Sanjay) driven to produce a “head turning” story by his rather honest editor (Anand Birajdar), answerable to a management that cares only about selling figures. The editor, who intends no malice, is nothing more than a loyal mason, able to make very few claims about his professional life. In Sanjay’s desperate search for a breaking story, he stumbles upon a story, a story within a story, finally blurring judgments between history and myth, the real and the imagined. So much so, it suggests that in a complete collapse of ideological superstructures, the only recourse is to live in the world of the “story”, and sadly, even that is short lived (as in the case of Kempe Gowda). What is sadder is that it is unsympathetically perpetrated by Jakkuji, who himself is living out a story. But as Jakkuji himself observes, we live in a world that buys mythologisation of history and not history itself (“Purana beku, itihaasa alla”).
The production is sophisticated in terms of its sets and the details it works out in terms of sound and music. One could even see that the actors were largely convinced and to that extent austere about what they were putting out. But there was a snap; beneath a veneer of humour, the play captures the complex nature of human existence in modern times, and in the production however, there was a visible visual emphasis on getting the “punches” across. With this, the reflective undertones got subsumed in laughter, which almost began to resonate like heartless cacophony. Strangely, some of the most introspective lines of the play were delivered to the walls. For instance, the scene in which Kempe Gowda reveals his real self to Sanjay. All this is neither to the discredit of the audience nor the performers. Why are we bogged down by the pressures of wooing the audience, and does that presume in it certain simplicity of intellect?
The three main characters – Sanjay, Kempe Gowda and Jakkuji, inhabit distinct spaces (external and internal) and thereby portray the fragmentary nature of the world we live in. But beneath this perceptible cover of differences, there is a homogeneity, in terms of the emotional-ideational world that each of them aspire to attain. The journey of the three small-towners into the metropolis is also the journey in which they painfully abandon a value system and set of beliefs that they grew up with. However, for Sanjay and Jakkuji, institutionalised by now, the tribulations of this suffering is far more bearable than it is for Kempe Gowda, the underdog, who has humbler dreams. And therefore, to mask his several identities, his multiple figments of imagination, the many characters that he contextually lives out, there is this imperative need to be dressed in white. Jakkuji who sells emotional calm wears white too. Is it then a comment on appropriation of colours? A cover under which we conceal our true identities, hide our real colours? In fact, the play even makes a forceful observation on the distortion of history, alluding to a recent right-wing pamphlet that masqueraded as a novel.
If one holds a difference with the play, it is with how we unconsciously breed stereotypes as in the reference to a young journalist Nisha, who charms her way up the career ladder. While you ask why it had to be a woman, you also wonder if new entrants to the profession, insensitive to their responsibilities, exist as water-tight compartments of quick and non-serious, serious and slow.
Krishna as Sanjay, Harish Somayaji as Jakkuji and Raghavendra as Birajdar put forth impressive performances. Lighting for the climax monologue could have perhaps been sharpened — where even as Kempe Gowda goes on presenting the multiple possibilities to his story, offers the multiple roles that he can don, he has no listeners, drowned as he is in urban din. He could be me, you, anybody, the voiceless, unheard underdog.
DEEPA GANESH
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