Mariam Karim, writer of “The Betrayal of Selvamary” — her maiden effort as a playwright — is an interesting mixture of the conservative and the liberal.
While her play exposes the class, caste and communal mindset of the well-heeled with a ruthless confidence, her own reluctance to venture into the city on her own or rearrange domestic commitments are distinctly, if sweetly, suggestive of upper middle class correctness.
“…Selvamary” rips off the mask of benevolence many an honourable citizen would be found wearing. It also presents us with a set of people of the type we are used to seeing in urban environments across India: an architect, a corporate head, a well-educated mother of two, an ex-model, a poet, and so on. Mariam admits her characters are ‘regular' kinds of people caught in an extraordinary situation.
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But as to whether she showed the play to her friends and whether anyone caught a reflection in the mirror, she answers with a simple, “Oh yes, they've all liked it very much.”
But then, Mariam is used to being taken seriously. Her first novel, My Little Boat, published by Penguin, was nominated for the Dublin International IMPAC Award and the Hutch Crossword Award. Her second, The Bereavement of Agnes Desmoulins, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009 even before publication.
Mariam, who also speaks Urdu, Hindi and French and teaches French language and literature, is also a widely-published children's author in English. These are written under the name Mariam Karim-Ahlawat and have been translated into several Indian languages. For Mariam, an alumna of New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University and Sorbonne, Paris, choosing the language of her play would not appear to be difficult, since educated Indians do converse in English. “Writing a play in English is quite challenging,” she remarks, “but realism is no longer a part of theatre. Theatre is a symbolic and representational space”.
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Because of the power of television and cinema to portray realism, theatre is no longer expected to be in the realistic mode, she points out, though concurring that there are audiences of different types, with different expectations.
Speaking of different, Mariam's writing too is diverse. One of her current projects is the staging of her musical about street children, “A Bagful of Dreams”. It is being produced by Arun Kapoor and Peggy Mohan.
Besides, she is involved with a project of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I've written five storybooks for children,” she explains. The books are to be translated into several languages, and Mariam will do the Hindi translations. Mariam says she would be “very happy to find a good director” for “The Betrayal of Selvamary”. There are no devices in it, she points out.
On the other hand, her script includes detailed stage instructions, down to the Hindi film song set as a ringtone on a character's cell phone or the bandhini design of another's clothes. That is because these details tell us something significant about the character, says Mariam. But though she wears many hats, the director's is a cap she will “never” don.
The last in the series of five interviews with writers shortlisted for the MetroPlus Playwright Award 2010