Shanta Gokhale has 14 books to her credit. That’s not all. She also has two National awards for documentary film scripts and two State awards for novels.
We meet her in the green Adishakti campus where the writer (who was a friend of Veenapani Chawla, founder of Adishakti) recently visited to watch its latest production, Bali . Excerpts from an email interview.
Is Bali the first production you are watching after Veenapani’s death? How was the experience, being in this space and interacting with Adishakti artistes like Nimmy Raphel and Vinay Kumar, mentored by Veenapani?
It was a very moving experience to see theatre practitioners whom Veenapani had nurtured come into their own and produce something so true to who they are. When you have lived with as awe-inspiring a person as Veenapani was, and participated in her complex creations, to try and do what she did in the way she did it, must have felt like an inescapable obligation.
To move out from under that great big tree and bloom on your own required courage, confidence and a desire to be true to her ideals by being true to themselves. This would not have been possible had she not had the vision to let them try out their ideas while she was alive. A few years ago she had asked each member of the core group to write and self-direct a piece based on a Ramayana story, with her help when required. Vinay Kumar’s The Tenth Head and Nimmy Raphael’s Nidravathwam were the results of that push. And now we have Bali .
My interactions with Vinay and Nimmy have been very lively. They are both creative thinkers, sparking with ideas. Apart from their creative work, it is amazing how they have held the place and team together and surfaced financially from a situation that was precarious, to put it mildly.
What brought you to Adishakti? What drove you to write a book on her?
I had known and admired Veenapani’s work from her years in Bombay. We had become friends. So I continued to visit her when she relocated to Pondicherry. I watched her plays taking shape through rehearsals and rewrites and more rehearsals and more rewrites. The process was exciting, her ideas were exciting, her plays were exciting. The experience of spending time with her watching her work motivated me to conceive and write the book.
You are one of the few writers to have translated Marathi plays into English. Do you feel regional literature in Maharashtra was not given its due?
It is not a question of regional theatre not been given its due. As a matter of fact Seagull Books started a series in the eighties specially for translations of modern Indian plays. Most of my translations have been first published by them before they went into collections.
The problem as far as Marathi plays go is that we have very few Marathi to English translators and fewer still who have the expertise required to translate plays. Regional plays at least get published in their own languages. English language plays rarely find a publisher.
I remember you telling me why you gradually stopped reviewing plays. Do you think culture demands as much a space in our newspapers and publishing houses as science, technology, business,sports and politics?
What I said was I have stopped reviewing plays I don’t care for. When there is so little space available for writing about the arts, why waste it on works that are uninteresting or downright bad? There has been no dearth of exciting plays for me to write about. So I confine myself to writing about them. As it is, in a weekly column which covers the whole gamut of culture including the political, I find myself hard pressed for space to accommodate all that I want to write about. So why include bad art?
We were talking about the playwright being dead the other day. Could you explain why? Do you think modern theatre is insensitive to the written word?
The journey that any art form makes may be seen as a series of shifts. You look back. You admire. But you cannot relate to what you see. Your lived life does not match the old representation.
Your ideas spring from your present, its circumstances and its pressures. A shift in viewpoint and approach is inevitable and a new form of art emerges. The visual arts have moved from flat surfaces to three-dimensional space and from paint to video. Traditional text-based theatre meant readymade plays written by somebody who was not a theatre practitioner but a writer sitting in his study and creating what she/he imagined would make a good piece of theatre.
The actor’s job then was to understand the playwright’s characters and bring them to life by speaking the playwright’s lines. The post-modern movement revolted against the centrality of all things, including playwrights. It was time for those on the margins to step into the centre. Actors said we have ideas, experiences and concerns which we would like to enact. That heralded the birth of devised plays, a collective effort that killed the playwright.
Plays then moved forward to the use of projected visuals and backward to the use of live music which had not been part of the written play. These movements have given us some interesting theatre but also occasionally disastrous or gimmicky theatre.
But the same could be said of plays written in the traditional way. Some make wonderful theatre; some do not. The fact is no art form can remain static. Shifts do not happen because some foolproof form of perfection has been discovered. They happen because they are impelled by socio-political forces. Change is its own merit.
Finally, at the risk of sounding extremely simplistic, why do you think art and spaces for art, even if a little isolated from mainstream civilization, must thrive? Even if that means it is a niche form that is not commercial and “liked by all”?
I don’t wear designer clothes. I can’t afford them. Some people can. They should be able to wear them. I don’t find anything to stimulate me in popular formulaic plays. But other plays give me experiences that enrich me. It should be possible for me to see them. Popular art has some chance of survival because it is designed to please people and people support it. Art that appeals to the few requires the support of governments or arts
institutions. This support is not merely for a handful of people to indulge themselves. It is for others too. They benefit when experiments conducted by artists seep into popular art. That is how popular art also changes and grows. Science research needs institutional support for the same reasons. Corporates, driven by the profit motive, will not offer this support. Governments must do it.
