An actor of no mean pedigree, Ajeet Singh Palawat has been assiduously flying under the radar in that self-effacing manner that only the very talented can afford to exhibit. This year Mumbai audiences were acquainted with his performances in plays like Muktidham and Gajab Kahani , in which he has worked with well-regarded contemporary auteurs like Abhishek Majumdar and Mohit Takalkar respectively.
A graduate of the National School of Drama, he has paid his dues as part of the premier institutes’s repertory company. One of the productions in which he had acquitted himself remarkably well was Anuradha Kapur’s Virasat , a composite of the plays that make up Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada Trilogy . As Parag, the youngest scion of a feudal household, Palawat gave us a strong measure of a rough-hewn man’s inherited parochialism that was still tempered by an essential humanism that years of conditioning didn’t seem to have tarnished. At the 2014 edition of the International Festival of Kerala, the play featured a well-staged sequence that served as an initiation of sorts into adulthood for Parag. The men of the household return from his grandmother’s funeral, and engage in ablutions in an open courtyard, attempting to rid themselves of the toxicity of death. Palawat, a bawling child up to that point, strips off his juvenile accoutrements, and emerges a man from the pit, seemingly returning from the interment of his own mother. With his now unfeeling eyes and coarsened demeanour, Palawat immediately drove home that utter loss of innocence and the continuation of a vicious cycle. When Parag is married off to Nandini, a self-possessed beacon of feminine strength and composure, in their interaction we observe the peeling of layers that leave us hopeful of his deliverance. Even in a play featuring a large pan-Indian ensemble, and spanning generations, Palawat stamped an indelible impression on the proceedings, Parag’s rites of passage seemingly mirroring his own.
Nature of nuance
The consummate actor has been part of Takalkar’s projects earlier, such as his staging of Ramu Ramanathan’s Comrade Kumbhkarna with the NSD repertory, and his independent film, The Bright Day . In 2015, Takalkar opened his production of Amir Nizar Zuabi’s Mein Hoon Yusuf Aur Yeh Hai Mera Bhai at the Prithvi Theatre festival, casting Palawat as Yusuf, one of two brothers at the centre of a tale set in strife-ridden Palestine at the time of the 1948 Palestinian Exodus. The part of a child-man, especially one with a degree of mental impairment, can take lesser actors on a circuitous route to self-mocking buffoonery and back, but Palawat was strikingly alive to his character’s autism. Yusuf serves well as the vantage whence the play can be viewed, always a knowing presence even if he cannot fully comprehend the crumbling of the world as he knows it. This allows him an equanimity even in the face of great adversity, which he holds on to for years (Ashish Mehta played Yusuf’s older avatar). Unlike Viraasat, where we saw Palawat nimbly graduate from child to adult, as Yusuf, he is always a fledgling presence, still managing to bring to the surface the disjunctions inherent in such a character.
This year’s Muktidham placed him on an ideological middle ground, as a battle of succession was waged in a Hindu monastery in the 8th century. Majumdar’s play is a polarised narrative, and two archetypes are instantly recognisable — the weak-kneed liberal and the obdurate hardliner who stake claims for a coveted mahantship soon to be vacant. As a third contender, Palawat is much more inscrutable. With his mane-like head of hair and classical countenance, he can convey both a benevolence that is comforting and a disquieting impenetrability simmering beneath. In between sentences, we view this subtle flickering of affiliations, as the actor negotiates the play’s volatile turf.
Character traits
In Gajab Kahani , reunited with frequent collaborator Takalkar, Palawat is an earthy presence as the mahout, Subhro, of a prized elephant, Solomon (Geetanjali Kulkarni), on whose travels in Europe was based the play’s source material, José Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey . Once again, Palawat suffuses Subhro with a disarming child-like quality borne perhaps out of the obsequiousness traditionally attributed to the service class, but never shorn of the stature and agency that is the birthright of all humans, irrespective of provenance. In one scene in which Shubro waxes eloquent on Indian religion and Indian ways, Palawat acquires the stance of an ideologue almost. It is a difficult and dangerous tightrope to walk, between what is simple and what is merely simplistic, but Palawat has shown himself to be a master of dichotomy. His contemporary roles certainly allow him this leeway. This is an actor who can embrace the unsympathetic even in the most facilely crowd-pleasing of turns, because he has no need yet to play to the gallery. Though, with his growing popularity, that may certainly change.
