Purva Naresh does not rest on her laurels

The global recognition of this playrirght-director’s work has brought with it exciting projects across continents.

April 19, 2018 04:01 pm | Updated 04:01 pm IST

Purva Naresh

Purva Naresh

An Indian playwright is given a brief by an Australian director to write a play that must have a caged bird, a girl on a train, a dog, a 500-year-old woman and a reference to female trafficking in India, and Purva Naresh comes up with a play titled ‘Jatinga’ that gets rave reviews for being “a highly provocative, intelligent and engrossing theatrical experience, which challenges romantic ideas of India.”

Purva Naresh, writer, director, dancer, pakhawaj player, and occasional actor, is getting international recognition and opportunities to work on exciting projects across continents.

Apart from ‘Jatinga’, she was comminssioned to adapt Amana Fontanella-Khan’s book Pink Sari Revolution into a play for Leicester’s Curve Theatre, directed by Subha Das, with local Asian actors. Earlier, her play ‘Ok Tata Bye Bye’ had a reading in London. Naresh wears her achievements lightly, but she is today, one of the most accomplished playwright-directors on the scene in India, with plays performed at Writers’ Bloc, Aadyam and her own group Aarambh that kicked off in 2010, with the outstanding musical, ‘Aaj Rang Hai’ , which is still running. “In fact,” she says, “how will I ever find time to write when the plays I have produced — ‘Bandish’, ‘Okay Tata Bye Bye’, ‘Ladies Sangeet’, ‘Umrao’ are all being performed in some city or the other.”

She is currently involved in a production, directed by Asmit Pathare, partly devised from a poem, All That I Wanna Do , by Sanjeev Khandekar. “It deals with a certain ideology and politics that the poet follows. After working on two plays for Aadyam (‘Ladies Sangeet’ and ‘Bandish’), I wanted to drain my mind of everything and just produce a play.”

For the last few years, Naresh worked at a high-pressure corporate job (which she quit eventually) and did big productions and film writing assignments “So,” she explains, “I can promote newer, younger work. I also often wondered if Aarambh will do just my plays or there is a larger vision to it. So it is good to do a play with a political conscience. I wanted to be a dramaturge on it, but I don’t know if I am equipped to do it. So I am involved with the production, but not very…in the sense I am not interfering.”

Women’s issues

All her plays have very strong female characters, and both the plays she worked on abroad are about women’s issues. ‘Pink Sari Revolution’ is about Sampat Pal and her now famous Gulabi Gang that fights for women’s causes in the north Indian hinterland. It follows the case of Sheelu, a Dalit girl, raped by an upper caste man, and then arrested and thrown into prison; it flows like a thriller but does not dilute the caste and political concerns.

Naresh has written another play based on the same subject but in a fictionalised format; she put it aside because ‘Pink Sari Revolution’ is planning an India tour. Disappointingly for Naresh, after attending the rehearsals for a month, she could not extend her visa to watch the show. “The other regret is that I could not work with Indian actors,” she says. “The Asian actors from the U.K. were trained and very good, but over there, India means Bollywood or ‘Kumars At No 42’ . How can they even be expected in a few weeks of rehearsal to understand what being a Dalit means.”

She also found the style of working very different from how things are in Indian theatre. “They are very process-driven. They have unions, so there is not one second of overtime. The movement director or sound director comes and works with the actor and goes away; there is an accent trainer, who is not even Indian but an Irish expert in accent. So they don’t have people spoonfeeding you; there are professional actors and other professionals who come together, grapple with the basics, get it all sorted and then the actor and the director work with the text. There is a lot of workshopping and talking around the issue, and there’s a dramaturge involved. I found it all a little regimented and time-table driven for my taste… I was impressed but I am not a fan of that method. But the good thing is that they do previews and change things according to feedback.”

Jatinga , named after a place in North-East India where birds go to commit mass suicide, was also commissioned by director Suzanne Millar, but Naresh says she had more freedom. “It did not end up what it started out as, which was an Australian playwright coming to India and writing a piece, and me going to Australia and writing a piece in response, like a cultural exchange experience. In the end, we both ended up doing standalone pieces. Suzanne, who has worked in Kamathipura, (Mumbai’s red light district) wanted the play to be about freedom for the girls. Initially, she did not even want me to translate it from Hindi, later I did, so things kept changing. I started with with a vague brief, then read about this place called Jatinga, and created a play about a surreal journey by a group of women to this place and blended it with poems I find compelling. Suzanne is a very interesting director, who gave it a very powerful imagery.”

She does admit, however, that a commissioned work demands a kind of surrender. “Inevitably there are points of departure between writer’s vision and the director’s. I would love to do the plays I write my way. But being part of another process and another journey is enriching too.”

The writer is a Mumbai-based author, critic and columnist

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