Languid frames that linger on the ageing wood of antique doors and trellises of an old ancestral home (or wada ) in Parwa, a small village in Maharashtra, establishes the biographical turf of Chirebandi , a new documentary feature on Mahesh Elkunchwar, arguably one of the last great playwrights of the Indian stage. At the old wada , Elkunchwar had spent long stretches of his childhood, having been dispatched to the nearby city of Yavatmal at age five for schooling, returning home only during holidays.
In Chirebandi, old dust settles on tables and rocking chairs, with the interplay of light and shade exquisitely captured by Aditya Divekar’s camerawork, even as the opening strains of a vintage musical recording by forgotten names from Elkunchwar’s clan allude to the richness of legacy that he was born into.
Director Mohit Takalkar, the well-regarded Pune-based stage auteur, infuses the film with a sense of history and heritage, and the cultural markers of a privileged life seen through the haze on an uncertain nostalgia. The documentary, commissioned by the Sahitya Akademi, was screened for select audiences in Pune and Nagpur earlier this year. Takalkar is intimately familiar with Elkunchwar, having helmed productions based on works from his oeuvre—his first full-length play, Garbo , and the narrative essay, Necropolis . The film is named after one of Elkunchwar’s seminal plays, Wada Chirebandi, written in 1985. The title translates as ‘Old Stone Mansion’; the wadas were, in effect, strongly patriarchal feudal households, and the last bastions of a social order that Elkunchwar had observed crumbling around him. He ultimately added two more plays to what became The Wada Trilogy. The word chirebandi itself means ‘fashioned out of stone’, and immediately brings to mind the antecedents, social and cultural, that may have contributed to the making of a somewhat reluctant literary icon.
Much-travelled man
Elkunchwar has been based in Nagpur since his youth, something Takalkar found especially intriguing. It provided him a line of inquiry that could veer his documentary away from the prescribed format of a standard issue Sahitya Akademi offering—usually snatches of interviews interspersed with staid archival footage. Creative souls are usually prone to be migratory birds. On one hand are economic incentives and on the other creative opportunities. One’s own abode could well become an ivory tower, although in Elkunchwar’s case, that has never been betrayed by works that reflect the world-view of a much-travelled man.
In the documentary, noted critic Samik Bandyopadhyay says, “I think this was his way of distancing himself from both Mumbai and his roots.” Mumbai and Pune have always been the nerve centres of Maharashtra’s cultural consciousness, to which Elkunchwar has contributed vastly from a remote vantage point. When he made occasional forays into unfamiliar terrain, like working on the film adaptations of his plays, Party and Holi , the experiences have been disillusioning. “These choices are never accidental. He stayed back in Nagpur to write the way he wanted to write and still made a mark,” says Takalkar.
“There are distinctive phases in his life. His childhood influenced him a lot, and the early plays were completely different,” says Takalkar. Elkunchwar grew up in a world of letters, was familiar with “Phadke and Kandekar” by the age of nine, and knew how being alone, as he frequently was, could feed the fervid imagination. The documentary includes photographic montages, and the penetrative gaze of a young visionary is very much in sight in those sepia-tinted frames. The director’s cut is 80 minutes, but the Akademi has procured only a 27-minute version, which has left Takalkar understandably peeved. “How can such a great life be encapsulated in just a nutshell,” he asks.
The talking heads include personages like Vijaya Mehta, Girish Karnad, Shanta Gokhale and Anuradha Kapur. Even though they have all been interviewed separately, Takalkar splices together these interviews in a manner that gives off the vibe of a shared conversation taking place in a communal forum. Elkunchwar mentions that the first play he ever watched was Vijaya Mehta’s production with Vijay Tendulkar. There are points of contention that Takalkar introduces that attempts to keep the film off hagiography. For instance, the influence of Tendulkar, which he acknowledges as “preparing the soil for me to sow the seeds”. Or his perceived lack of a pronounced political outlook, which Kapur disagrees with, saying, “A humanistic approach is always sharply political.” Or the critical failures of some of his later plays, which he distances himself from, married as he is to the arduous but joyful process of creation itself, and not its fruits. Much of the discourse from the talking heads takes place in an academic vein, declaimed from plush living-rooms, which seems at odds with a theatre so rooted in the human condition. Archival footage of staged plays gives us glimpses of Elkunchwar’s intimately-etched characters but we never actually meet them. The sincerity of Takalkar’s effort shines through, as does the quality of production, but the film flows over a bedrock of missed opportunities.
The writer has been perennially fascinated with the arclights, and the adrenaline of live performance never ceases to amaze him.
