Meditations on patriarchy and heroism

Swati Das will act in two back-to-back productions, one – that explores the position of Indian women and the other – notions of martyrdom

On stage: Swati Das (right) with Spatica Ramanujam

It has taken six-odd years for an Indo-Swedish comedy on feminine oppression to finally receive an airing in the country at the very heart of its consideration. Coming close at the heels of shows in Bengaluru, Colour Correction will be staged in Mumbai this week. The play has been devised by Indian performers Swati Das and Spatica Ramanujam and Swedish director Bjorn Dahlman. In the unsettled aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang-rape, and the worldwide outrage it provoked, a chance encounter between the collaborators quickly escalated from a casual conversation to an unfettered argument with obvious stage potential.

“The play began as a take on how the position of women in Indian society was being represented in Europe, especially by the Scandinavian media,” says Das. This perspective was valid, according to her, but also one-dimensional and often sensational. Through the character of an Indian actress attempting to break into the mainstream Hindi film industry, Colour Correction , true to the complex politics inherent in its title, became a meditation on caste, race, gender and the patriarchy governing it. It is a collaboration between the Uppsala-based Bananteatern, Bengaluru’s Mukha Mugam Theatre Company and Swedish performing arts collective Bonthrop.

Subverting the gaze

In Sweden, the play has been staged in public venues and universities, implicating its audiences in the white gaze it attempts to subvert. Indeed, in a ‘meta’ moment, Dahlman steps into the ‘play within the play within the play’ as a culturally short-sighted stage director, whose mutinous actors take over the second half in an act of protest over his selective delineation of their stories. Of course, this is not indicative of the real-life teamwork between the principals and the synergy they shared. “The situations [were as] heartbreaking on a personal level as disturbing on a political level, and also had a layer of absurdity,” says Dahlman in his press note. “It is totally necessary to highlight the absurdity and through laughter understand the unbelievable stupidity that humankind is capable of.” In India, it is its indictment of patriarchy that is proving to be the play’s calling card.

In Colour Correction, Das plays multiple characters including several men, with the seductive braggadocio that we’ve witnessed in her turn as Petruchio in Deshik Vansadia’s gender-crossed Taming of the Shrew, which opened in 2018. Last year, as part of an international ensemble cast drawn from the Prague Shakespeare Company’s Summer Shakespeare intensive training program, she played another male character, that of Kent, in Kevin John Hopkins’ King Lear. And next week, in a premiere, she plays two teenage revolutionaries, male and female, in Mahesh Dattani’s latest work as writer and director, Snapshots of a Fervid Sunrise. “Playing a gender far removed from one’s own is something I find challenging and attractive,” she says. That said, these are not archetypal parts, and present dualities that perhaps transcend gender. In King Lear, for instance, the banished Earl of Kent spends most of the play’s running time, disguised as the commoner Caius. Even Petrucio in the misogynistic madness that is Taming of the Shrew, is redeemed by Das’ study of him as an idiosyncratic individual rather than a cipher for patriarchy. In Dattani’s piece, negotiating Khudiram Bose, a vulnerable teenage whose expression of masculinity was altogether different. “The absolute presence of gender, as it was with Petrucio, is not something I’m experiencing in this play, which is more about its characters’ idealistic fervour,” she explains.

Dattani has cast Das alongside Shubham Chaudhury in his play about two lesser known adolescent martyrs — the aforementioned Bose, hanged at 18 for a bombing in Muzaffarpur, and Thillaiyadi Valliammai, a Tamil satyagrahi in South Africa, who died at 16 after three months with hard labour at Maritzburg. Both Das and Chaudhury alternate between the two personas — once again, an irresistible duality — in a play that employs stick-fighting as a visual motif. Valliammai and Bose questioned economic and political hegemony, in ironic contrast to the latter-day strain of nationalism that seeks to impose a supremacy in which the

lathi has become a symbol of oppression.

Colour Correction on February 7 and 8; Snapshots of a Fervid Sunrise on February 12; more details at bookmyshow.com