Several striking moments pepper Anuradha Kapur’s Viraasat , a fairly recent NSD production based on Mahesh Elkunchwar’s seminal Wada trilogy, the first play, Wada Chirebandi , was written in 1984. In one of the play’s early scenes, an old widow slips away from the corner in which she is deposited each night like a sack of potatoes by her grandson. In the deathly stillness of night, she crawls inch by inch on the floor of the family mansion’s sprawling courtyard, calling out, perhaps to the husband who died, or the son who left home, or to the benign god of lesser beings who is most certainly a man, to take her away. And it does. The scene poignantly underlines what it would all amount to for women in the household, and with never an utterance except in these dying moments, the actor in question bodily evokes with remarkable precision the senility of a once sentient person. This is the nature of loss the play deals with: the loss of women’s lives.
Later, her daughter-in-law, the household’s complaining matriarch, Aai, finds herself slowly losing agency in her own home. She tries to protect her turf by unquestioningly siding with her sons in each domestic matter. The men hold the balance of power and will be her keepers. Her unmarried daughter, the idealistic Prabha, is thus marginalised and pushed towards a self-inflicted incarceration in the attic. The scenography by Deepan Sivaraman recreates every aspect of a traditional feudal household in Vidarbha. The stage of performance is a replica of actual living quarters, with a courtyard, a kitchen, and several sleeping chambers. Around this are included seats for the audience, creating several avenues of spectatorship. You could watch from a distance in the rows behind, or peek in from an open window, or curl up in the recesses under a makeshift staircase, with the aromas of the freshly cooked meal of poha (that the play begins with) wafting in. The urgency of the drama in such a hyper-real setting is certainly compounded. Prabha’s descent into an impenetrable silence confronts us with a searing immediacy.
The play, which runs into four long hours, nonetheless features several time collapses. When a long-lost son arrives at the doorstep, we suddenly find Aai bent over with age and infirmity, reduced to a forlorn figure who flashes a torch into people’s faces to figure out who they are, whilst idling her time away in the shadows. We miss the strident woman who stood upright and seemingly spoke in her own voice, entreating and cajoling.
Viraasat is about the laws of inheritance that exclude women. These are themes often regurgitated in our stories, but under Kapur’s direction, they become palpable and aesthetically larger than life, and the beauty crystallises into an unmistakable poignancy that makes the production a moving experience for those who manage to stay till the end.
In another powerful sequence, the men return from Aai’s funeral, and engage in ablutions, attempting to rid themselves of the toxicity of death. The youngest boy, who we see growing up before our eyes during the running time of the play (always played by the same actor), emerges a man from the pit. The play leaves us with a sense of optimism when yet another woman marries into the household, bringing with her the whiff of a new progressiveness. Nanda is a woman of breathtaking self-sufficiency and her husband, who is perhaps pre-destined to be a boorish sort like the men who came before him, finds himself no stranger to the idea that a woman asserting herself, however gracefully and non-confrontationally, is a good thing, and it’s something he might have expected of his own mother, or aunt, or sisters. Viraasat allows us some disdain at the spinelessness of those women, their silences and their complicity in the squashing of their own hopes and aspirations. But, it is the callous disregard for women exhibited by the men that is ultimately indicted. The tempers and rhythms of the women percolate this space, in which their own volition was severely compromised. That this can be turned around, is the greatest hope Viraasat leaves us with.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
