Deepan Sivaraman, theatre director, scenographer and associate professor at Ambedkar University, directs O.V. Vijayan’s novel, The Legends of Khasak. The director who has designed and directed more than 60 performances for various companies and academic institutions in India and Europe speaks about the making of his play.
Excerpts from an interview:
Are you an admirer of O.V. Vijayan? Is that what led you to choose Legends of Khasak?
Of course, I admire O.V. Vijayan and believe that the Legends of Khasak is one of the best literary works of Malayalam. When KMK Kalasamithi approached me to do a production in 2016 based in Trikaripur, I started looking for an appropriate text. I wanted a text with which I can strongly identify and something which can communicate well with my actors, all from the village of Trikaripur.
In the last 20 years of my career, I have not worked with any Malayalam text. All my works have been based on texts from various parts of the world. Though I spent most of my life in Kerala, I never thought of taking any Malayalam literary work to produce a play. Khasak, which I had read some 20 years ago, was stuck in mind and I thought I should do something with it.
It is a text I strongly relate to. I was born and brought up in a small village in Thrissur. Though there is a protagonist in the novel, Ravi, Khasak is not a story of an individual. This core aspect is one of the main things that attracted me towards this work.
Another important reason was the audience. The audience has to be able to closely relate to the play they watch. In Trikaripur, I found a society which can relate to and communicate with Khasak strongly. It is a pluralistic society with Islam and Hindu cultures co-existing.
What was the process of transforming the novel into a performative text?
It has been a long process. It is not something which can happen in five or six months of time. In 2006, I worked on Khasak in collaboration with director Abhilash Pillai. This is a very local production developed in Trikaripur and I give a lot of credit to their unique, diverse culture which is reflected in the play.
After all these decades, when we are revisiting Khasak, it cannot be structured as a contemporary story. The social structure depicted in Khasak is now gone. The villages of Kerala have changed significantly. Hence I had to position it as a story of a bygone era. The location was coincidental as they invited me to do the play there. But as mentioned earlier, there exists a strong connection between the people of Trikaripur and the stories and characters of Khasak.
We didn’t have a script to begin with. I believe it imposes a rigid structure on the team and the work. It creates walls around the actors and prohibits me from extracting the best out of their potential or working around their limitations. The evolution of the script was done through extensive improvisations by all the actors, in the large canvas of the village.
We casted all the characters from Trikaripur and the nearby villages and none of them are formally trained professional actors. Their diverse backgrounds, lifestyles, body languages and body types helped me a lot with the casting. Khasak required that kind of an approach.
Legends of Khasak is a difficult novel, this was said about the novel even when it created waves back in the 70s. The novel also records a period of change in the politics and inner landscape of the writer. Was it difficult to capture these registers?
Khasak is a difficult novel to transform into other medium. The main problem with adapting Khasak is that the novel is filled with literary images of which the beauty can be expressed only through words. Considering that some parts and characters of the novel are more theatrical than others, I decided not to attempt to capture the entire novel in the play. If someone is interested in experiencing the entirety of Khasak , they will have to read Vijayan’s novel. They cannot get the same experience from the play. The play is a very different work.
Regarding the politics, yes, communism was becoming a lost hope for Vijayan, like many others of that generation witnessing the failure of communist systems around the world. I can easily relate with that he was going through. But none of these are overtly elaborated in Khasak . One can easily confuse what he has written in Khasak as a pro-revolutionary piece. I have retained this element in the play with similar subtlety and satire. The portion where Churukku is sleeping and his snoring is growing louder, for instance.
And the play is not entirely a Vijayan work. When the form is changed, I had to find a different language. My task was to take many fragments of life that happens in the novel, create a new structure around it and a create a new theatrical experience for the audience. That is what I attempted to do here.
You drew all your actors from Trikaripur and nearby villages…
The question of training for an actor is a problematic and debatable notion. Many people ask me “Oh, you work with non-actors!” For them actors are trained actors, non-actors are who you pick from every part of the society. But they need to realise that you have to train those “non-actors”. In our process, I have trained my actors for about four months. Through those four months of rigorous training, these “non-actors” actually become actors. They become quite comparable with any trained, professional actors at the end of the process.
For me, the only difference between a professional and an amateur actor is that the latter has to do some other job also for a living. My actors in Khasak include a farmer, doctor, health inspector, painter, auto driver and others who are into many other jobs. So they are part-timers. NSD graduates can do a great job of controlling their body and voice. But if they don’t understand the life of Kuppuvachan and what he is talking… they can only assume things and pretend to perform.
I feel the worlds of Basheer and Vijayan meet. It’s a complete world -- all kinds of people find a place here. Does this make it possible for you to place the story in any location?
It is an interesting question. Vijayan and Basheer were never contemporaries. Many of Vijayan's works, especially the later ones like Dharmapuranam and Gurusagaram are long ones, not very Basheerian in style. But Khasak has a clear, deep connect with Basheer's writings. One of the reasons is the focus on subaltern people. Both are about the life of subaltern characters. Look at Basheer’s characters like Ottakkannan Pokkar and Chukku Ravutthar or Kuppuvachan from Khasak. There is a commonality - they are all common people you see around in everyday life.
Another connect between the two writers is their common concern about the ownership of this land. Basheer’s “Bhoomiyude Avakashikal (Owners of the land)” is a very popular work. Vijayan also in Khasak shares the same concern. The cat, the snake, the rain, the banyan tree, the palm tree, the paddy fields, the pond, the fish.. everything has a placein Khasak. This is where we see Basheer in Vijayan’s writing.
Basheer and Vijayan are my favourite writers. I have read all of their works, more than anybody else’s. I found that there is something humane about their works, you feel very close and attached to their writings. It is quite possible to place their stories in many locations. People who do not know the characters of Basheer and Vijayan will still find an entry point. That is the entry point of basic human nature.
The play is at
Christ School (ICSE) Ground, Christ School Road, Dharmaram College Post, Bengaluru on
May 6, 7 and 8. Time 7 p.m.
Email: nammakhasak@gmail.com
