Kiran Nagarkar: the playwright provocateur

September 06, 2019 09:30 pm | Updated 09:30 pm IST

German production: A performance of Gottes Kleiner Krieger

German production: A performance of Gottes Kleiner Krieger

One of the many hats worn by the late Kiran Nagarkar was that of playwright cum provocateur, and his output for the stage, while not prolific, was not insubstantial in its import. One might idly speculate on what works he would have spawned had his 1977 opus in Marathi, Bedtime Story, not remained unproduced for 17 long years. An irreverent take on the Mahabharata, it was written during the dark hours of the Emergency, but even with the change of the political guard in 1977, its ethos was considered unpalatable for middle-class consumption by the self-styled custodians of culture. The censor board initially ordered 78 cuts, “some of them a page long, so that barely the jacket-covers were left,” according to the writer in his acerbic introduction to the English translation brought out in 2015 by an imprint of Harper Collins. Stalling or inordinately delaying a play’s certification was tantamount to a ban. Eminent personalities like Dr Shreeram Lagoo gathered support for the play, and academicians argued its case, substantially abbreviating its proposed bowdlerisation. However, the production couldn’t go ahead because of right-wing threats to the collaborators who had signed on.

Political statement

The play’s strength was the utterly subversive manner in which commonly known episodes from the great epic were presented in each of its four acts, with Draupadi, Eklavya and Gandhari coming to the fore as harbingers of a new reckoning. It was a play with strong pacifist leanings. “I was fresh out of college, but I realised what it must have felt like in Eastern Europe, where samizdat performances of cutting-edge, political plays took place just that way,” wrote journalist Salil Tripathi, of a 1982 reading organised by Rekha Sabnis. In 1995, it was finally staged by her theatre group, Abhivyakti, and directed by Achyut Deshingkar for a limited run of 25 performances. That year, another play by Nagarkar was staged in Marathi — Kabirache Kaya Karayache, based on the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1993. A Hindi version of Bedtime Story followed a couple of years later, even as cultural reproval of it c ontroversial content continued.

Although his literary output remained steadfast, the imbroglio had a profound impact on Nagarkar. He had said on record, “The space for writing has shrunk to a point which is disastrous because, from the time that Bedtime Story was banned, I have been censoring my own way of thinking.” It is unlikely that Nagarkar’s passing will result in a slew of revivals for his sole theatrical masterpiece, like Karnad’s death has generated for his works (which were already widely in circulation). Perhaps, a renewed interest in Bedtime Story might come about, as the slim volume of a 100 pages jostles for attention alongside his other weighty (and quite literally at that) tomes. The latter includes the 700-page novel, God’s Little Soldier, which, rather improbably, was picked up for a stage adaptation by the Theater Freiburg in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The German language production, Gottes Kleiner Krieger opened in 2014. It was directed by the German-Swiss director duo, Jarg Pataki and Viola Hasselberg, and is a story about religious extremism told with Bollywood-style excess, rejigged as ‘found art’ to marry fanaticism with spectacle. That year, Pataki had conducted intercultural workshops with director Sunil Shanbag in Mumbai. Perhaps Shanbag’s naturalistic and nuanced approach to performing on stage might have resulted in an altogether different telling of the play drawn from the book. Although it received middling reviews, its subject matter is particularly topical, invested on the radical Zia, who shifts religion mid-stream but none of his extremism is expunged on the altar of belief. The entertaining Ravan and Eddie is another Nagarkar classic th at might work wonderfully on stage.

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