On October 6, the Manipuri theatre stalwart Oja Heisnam Kanhailal passed away after a brief illness. He was 75. The honorific ‘Oja’, deferentially invoked by locals, alludes to his reputation as a great teacher. Kanhailal was awarded the Padma Bhushan this year, and has received several other plaudits in his lifetime, like the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for direction in 1985, the Natya Ratna in 1997 from the Manipuri Sahitya Parishad and the Sangeet Natak Akademi fellowship (or the Akademi Ratna) in 2011. The last named is the highest honour in the performing arts conferred by the Government of India.
One is therefore struck by the utter paucity of column inches accorded to the doyen in the mainstream press in the days since his passing. Only one national daily carried an obituary of some import. Yet, perhaps it isn’t surprising at all given the alienation of Manipur on the national stage, at a time when the State continues to remain under the pall of militarised oppression. In many ways, it also points towards the artistic autonomy of Kanhailal’s theatre which operated resolutely outside the system, and did not shy away from the politics of resistance and reform so germane to the milieu to which he belongs. In a 2013 piece for Humanities Underground , Trina Nileena Banerjee writes of how Kanhailal’s austere theatre foundry, Kalakshetra Manipur, located at the outer-most limits of Imphal, has “quietly celebrated a position of silence and liminality as a source of strength, creativity and resilience”.
If one were to take a clutch of recent writings on Kanhailal, and feed them into one of those ‘word cloud’ generators, there are certain names and phrases that immediately bubble to the surface. His wife and muse, Sabitri Heisnam, who became the receptacle with which to conceptualise his notions of harnessing the performance energy of the body.
His great contemporary, Ratan Thiyam, master of the stage spectaculars that are a parallel culture in themselves to Kanhailal’s own spartan lyricism. Rustom Bharucha, whose volume, The Theatre of Kanhailal: Pebet and Memoirs of Africa , published by Seagull books in 1992, is one of the definitive works on the man.
Then there are his plays: Draupadi, Pebet, Tamnalai, Nupi Lan. Perhaps his most talked about production in recent years, Draupadi was based on Mahasweta Devi’s short story on Dopdi Mejhen, a tribal woman revolutionary arrested and gang-raped in custody. Interestingly, this week’s articles on Kanhailal in local dailies like The Imphal Times , or The Sangai Express , make no mention of the play. This is probably because Draupadi, after only two controversial performances in Imphal in 2000, was banned in the state. The climatic scene, in which Sabitri discards all her clothes, and exhorts the soldiers to ‘encounter’ her, appeared to strike a raw nerve with local observers, including feminists. It has since performed all over India but remains shut out of its home state because Kanhailal refused to stage a compromised version without the nudity. In 2004, he felt vindicated by a real-life demonstration, when twelve middle-aged Meithei women stripped naked in broad daylight in front of an Assam Rifles army outpost, to protest the brutal rape and death of Thangjam Manorama, a young Manipuri girl picked up by the army on the suspicion of being an insurgent. The imagery so redolent in Draupadi , of the body as a site of resistance, can be seen even in contemporary works like Surjit Nongmeikapam’s Nerves .
There is a somewhat apocryphal tale that often does the rounds — of Kanhailal’s expulsion from the National School of Drama in 1963. The official reason is a leave of absence without permission. Kanhailal has maintained it was because of his lack of communication skills in either English or Hindi. This in turn led to his turning his back on both the institutionalised brand of theatre that would have curbed his native intuition, and the theatre of words. In the anthology, Ritual Theatre: Theatre of Transition , Kanhailal writes of his training process: “We swallowed the text and absorbed it into our body instead of speaking out the lines through lip movement, facial and finger gestures. We shattered the whole network of illusion on the stage. We were no longer burdened with the heavy light, costume and make-up.” This eschewing of text is something contemporary theatre-makers are still grappling with, but Kanhailal took it to a whole different level in his works. His popular plays like Pebet , a 1975 production based on fireside stories, and 1973’s Kabuui-Keioiba , based on a folktale about a strange ‘half-man half-tiger’ creature, are marked by this non-verbal veneer of sheer expressiveness that conveys everything demanded of their themes. They stand testament to an unflinching work ethic that is now perhaps anachronistic.
Kalakshetra Manipur itself is perhaps far from winding down, but it has certainly lost its most potent driving force.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
