In memory of the dearly departed

Shabana Azmi reprises her role as a novelist in Girish Karnad’s Broken Images this weekend

Within a span of only eight months, the consummate actor Shabana Azmi has lost (as have we) both her primary collaborators on Broken Images , the one-woman show she has been performing with great aplomb for some nine years now. Directed by Alyque Padamsee and written by Girish Karnad, the play’s latest shows in Delhi and Mumbai are thus lent a particular poignancy, staged as they are in the shadow of the dearly departed. Azmi had last met Karnad in Bengaluru, on the sidelines of the play’s run there in April this year. Of course, their association dates back to when they co-starred in 1970s films like Nishant and Swami , as intrepid poster-children for India’s burgeoning parallel cinema movement. Two of Karnad’s most accomplished plays, Tughlaq and Hayavadana , had already been staged to great acclaim by then, but it was his film career that gave his literary reputation a fillip.

Politics of language

Broken Images is Karnad’s English translation of his own play in Kannada,

Odakalu Bimba , that was first performed in 2005.

The formidable Arundhati Nag played the protagonist in both the Kannada and Hindi versions. The latter, a translation by Padmavati Rao, was titled Bikhre Bimb . The play features a solitary actor essaying novelist Manjula Sharma, who interacts throughout with what appears to be the digital projection of her doppelgänger (later revealed to be a wheelchair-bound sibling). Manjula is a professor of Hindi who has written her first English novel, and is reaping the benefits of what is perceived to be as a linguistic volte-face. The play is among other things, a meditation on the politics of language.

It marked a departure from Karnad’s steady output of works drawn from history or mythology, and was perhaps seeped in the irony of his own plays receiving the most attention in their English translations.

His was a bilingualism that could’ve been seen as playing into the hands of an elite literary establishment. Indeed,

Broken Images is self-justifying in its tenor, depending on which unreliable narrator we align ourselves with, however, acquires significance when taken in the context of the socio-cultural space Karnad inhabited.

Azmi plays Manjula with the right mix of superciliousness and defensiveness even as, in the mien of a slowly peeling onion, the play reveals its layers and, in the process, Manjula’s contradictions. Her singular presence on stage might create the impression of Broken Images being yet another standard issue monologue. The reality is far from it, since the representation of the sister involves a single-take hour-long pre-recorded video of Azmi herself, that the character of Manjula must react to in real time. For the actor, it means finishing her lines in timely fashion, never missing a cue, and constraining herself to be guided, in an odd reversal of prescience, by the censorious gaze of the woman in the video. It’s a technological challenge in no small degree that must be meticulously achieved in order for the play’s central trope to register as authentic, and Azmi is certainly up for it. Interestingly, the Kannada and Hindi versions with Nag were Karnad’s first-ever directorial ventures on stage, in collaboration with K M Chaitanya, who helmed the play’s technological aspects. Of course, the playwright was an accomplished film director with around a dozen credits including Ondanondu Kaladalli (1977), Utsav (1984) and Cheluvi (1992).

Karnad Tributes

Fifty-odd days since the laureate’s passing, the steady trickle of Karnad tributes in the city continues unabated. Even the Company Theatre has got in on the action with an experimental presentation of Hayavadana at the Veda Factory, directed by ten different ‘young’ directors, ostensibly all at once.

It’s an offering slated for this evening. The budding helmers include Niharika Lyra Dutt, Niketan Sharma, Roshan Shetty and Tushar Dalvi. Elsewhere, another director, Abhinav Grover, has begun work on a retelling of Tughlaq which will feature a much tighter ensemble than the overflowing basket of deplorables usually associated with the classic.

Broken Images will stage on August 3 and 4 at St. Andrews, Bandra at 7.30 p.m; for more details, visit bookmyshow.com