It was a congregation of artistes, writers and performers at The Folly, Amethyst. In a way, the diverse guests, invited to the launch of Gowri Ramnarayan’s collection of plays, Dark Horse & other plays , said a lot about the multi-facted personality that Ramnarayan is — playwright, theatre director, journalist in The Hindu (for 23 years), musician and writer. Mukund Padmanabhan, Editor, The Hindu , was the special guest, musician TM Krishna, received the first copy, retired diplomat and former Governor of Bengal, Gopalkrishna Gandhi launched the book.
The anthology consists of six plays written between 2004 and 2017. Every play raises questions about the role of art today, and the responsibility of an artiste in a world, battered by violence.
The session involved a reading and performance of two of her plays. Water Lilies, by theatre professional Varun Aiyer and actor and scholar, Akhila Ramnarayan, was a fascinating exchange of contrasting cultural discourses between a Serbian-Hungarian professor and a God-fearing Tamil girl at a US airport. Night’s End , the second one, was a moving story set in a tiger sanctuary in Rajasthan.
Gandhi, who is also a family friend of Ramnarayan, shared some charming episodes. “How can a person like Gowri not be in theatre?” he said while talking about their family filled with artistes and great cooks. Gandhi also concluded by saying that some places like Chennai have an intense form of theatre. “Gowri has transcended the limitations of time and societal construct to find the meaning of theatre here in the city.”
Krishna, who had taken music lessons from Ramnarayan as a child, at The School KFI (Krishnamurthy Foundation India) said he used to devour her writings on cinema that would elaborate on the sense of aesthetics and form. “And, the fact that she would travel the world to attend film festivals and write about the films she watched would fill me with jealousy all the time. Gowri’s pieces could actually take you into the film and give you a sense of it, that is hard to capture.”
Being a musician, a writer, journalist and a playwright, Ramnarayan was a person hard to categorise, Padmanabhan observed. While talking about his experience as her colleague in The Hindu , he said, “I was in the stodgier, more boring editorial side of things, while she was in the more hep, colourful and fun feature-writing department. It filled me with great admiration and envy. Envy because she had the perfect job where she used to write on a wide variety of subjects over a range of publications in The Hindu . Admiration because I haven’t seen any other journalist in The Hindu , then, who brought the same range of skills, not just to work but outside it as well.”
Ramnarayan said theatre is a living force to the community so that we can use it to resist negative forces. “When you you write, direct, perform, watch and participate in theatre, we are not alone or lonely. It gives you the strength to survive and dissent.”
(The book is available at sruti.com.)
