Those following the elections stateside have no doubt encountered a barrage of spurious tales that become such powerful verbal missives despite their uncertain authenticity. What goes viral acquires its own veracity if enough people believe it. There is always a large unseemly ‘asterisk’ attached to each claim, or counter-claim. The ‘asterisk’ does sometimes appear to have the ring of truth about it, but remains steadfastly in the realm of the patently unverifiable. Of course, half a century down the line, even history can become mere hearsay, depending on which pugnacious lobby on Wikipedia manages to push their edits further.
In Indian theatre, whose vast history and scope remains as vastly undocumented, many of us rely on the power of the apocryphal to deal us a parallel history that has the texture of something that has most likely happened, but not exactly, never exactly. Yet, the drift captures the spirit of those times.
So, as the story goes, thespian Pankaj Kapur was once assigned a non-speaking part in a play directed by no less a personage than Satyadev Dubey. All he had to do was sit at the corner and jab away at a typewriter. Show after show, viewers would approach Dubey enquiring about this striking new talent. Exasperated, he asked Kapur to “ zara kam achhi acting karo ” (act a little less well). The name of the play has been long forgotten, as have details of space and vintage, but it is a story that provides much succour to theatre journeymen consigned to bit parts often sold to them as the most essential pieces in a puzzle. Stories about Dubey — his brilliance, his intransigence — could fill volumes.
Then there are the accounts of Jana Natya Manch’s (Janam) production Machine in 1978, one of those rare occasions in which agitprop met high art and the marriage was sublime. This was one of their first plays, and its stylised dialogues and visual metaphors brought alive the oppression of industrial labour. So enthused were the onlookers (mostly trade union delegates) by the street performance, that after the play, they carried Safdar Hashmi and his cohorts on their shoulders from India Gate to Jantar Mantar, a distance of three whole kilometres. Of course, this isn’t entirely an apocryphal tale, but a documented part of Janam’s history. But it’s always a story best heard recounted as a first-person narrative, even from those who may actually have been too young to have attended the actual event. Even the camel carts that became such a feature of Janam’s rural excursions were supposedly first encountered in Hanumangarh, Rajasthan, circa 1980, where they performed the play, Aya Chunav . A swarming crowd of more than a 1,000 farmers necessitated the creation of a temporary rostrum using camel carts that the villagers heaved into perfect formation.
Another story in free circulation: Naseeruddin Shah’s disastrous encounter with theatre legend Jerzy Grotowski in the Polish woods, on which he expounds in some detail in his memoirs, And Then One Day : A Memoir . It appears to have spawned a small breed of actors who have now written off Grotowski completely, if the grapevine at the local acting studio is to be believed. Then, there is this quote, widely credited to BV Karanth, upheld as some kind of mantra, “Sing as if you are speaking, and speak as if you are singing”. Or the adulation that came Manohar Singh’s way when he performed as the title character in Ebrahim Alkazi’s Tughlaq , at Delhi’s Purana Qila, circa 1972. The play made him an instant rock star, thronged by autograph-seekers everywhere, a la Rajesh Khanna. Further afield, there are the shadowy accounts of how right-wing subversives infiltrated the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in the ’80s, rendering its politics ineffectual.
In theatre gatherings, such as the opening night at the recent Prithvi Theatre Festival, a few glasses of sangria down, actors become raconteurs par excellence, and the same oft-repeated stories are once again brought out for an airing. These iterations exchange many hands and several lips. Many may have emanated straight from the horse’s mouth, but one would be loathe to verify each communiqué . There is very little charm in that. Cold, dry facts can never substitute for colourful alternative histories, however deluded. Nor can vehement denials erase the power of stories that can be so casually believed.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic.
