story that offers up everything it has in one single sitting is no cosmic story,” writes Amruta Patil in Adi Parva . Perhaps it is true that the charm of an engaging story lies in its capacity to be retold. And the Mahabharata is no exception.
This epic tale, will now unfold through Sanjukta Wagh’s solo show, Rage and Beyond: Irawati’s Gandhari . Ms Wagh, who has trained in Kathak with Rajashree Shirke, as a Hindustani classical vocalist with Murli Manohar Shukla, and in theatre with Chetan Datar, is not just the actor, she’s also the director, choreographer, dancer, singer and script writer of this production.
Wagh’s dance-theatre presentation takes off from Irawati Karve’s book Yuganta , which approaches the Mahabharata through a sociological lens. In this collection of essays (first published in Marathi in 1967, and in English in 1969), the characters are neither glorified, nor vilified. They are treated as products of social circumstances, norms, and attitudes. “The story of the Mahabharata,” says Wagh, “is not new to me. I know it from my childhood, when my mother and grandmother used to narrate episodes from it. What Yuganta did was open up new ways of reading the same story, of understanding issues of gender, caste and colonisation through a text that was until then just mythology for me.”
The opportunity to engage with Yuganta came in January 2014, when Dr Gita Chadha, from the Department of Sociology at Mumbai University invited Wagh to perform at a seminar, ‘Genders, Feminisms and Sociologies: Towards A State of Altered-ness’. Chadha, who describes herself as a feminist sociologist, says, “The seminar was an effort to document the contributions of women to sociology as a discipline, but I also felt the need to bring alive non-academic writings of women sociologists. Women often express their creativity more freely in non-academic writing. That is when I approached Sanjukta to engage with Yuganta . I left it to her to choose the character she wanted to embody.”
Wagh chose Gandhari because of the way in which Karve explored the character’s inner life, as not . In Karve’s retelling, Gandhari is not merely daughter to Subala, wife to Dhritarashtra, mother to the Kauravas, and sister to Shakuni, she is a unique entry point into a story that is often reduced to two armies of men battling it out.
Over long conversations with Chadha, Wagh developed an original script interspersed with excerpts from Karve’s text. In Rage and Beyond , Wagh plays both the protagonists, Gandhari, the queen of Hastinapur, as well as Karve, a much-fêted scholar.
“Sanjukta’s script is powerful,” Chadha says, “What is particularly interesting to witness is Sanjukta’s struggle to embody and present Irawati Karve, the academic. While Gandhari is more easily acceptable as a performance character, Karve is not. Sanjukta is very consciously experimenting with the two. I like the way she has translated a rather dry quasi-academic text into an emotive experience.”
Wagh says, “As a classical dancer, I have been dealing with mythological characters since a long time. But Irawati’s Gandhari made me rethink a lot of my ideas. Her act of tying a blindfold around her own eyes was not the act of a self-sacrificing pativrata towards her blind husband: it was an act of agency, and intense rage towards a world that had decided her fate to be married to this man without even asking her.” She was fascinated by Gandhari’s relationship with the blindfold. “Was she a victim of her blindfold, or was she empowered by it?” asks Wagh. “Did it shield her from reality, or from taking responsibility? At times, the blindfold is like a noose around her neck. At other times, she uses [it] manipulatively.”
This open-ended reading of Gandhari's place in the Mahabharata is reminiscent of Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean (2012). Patil, like Wagh, references Yuganta . The idea of Gandhari as “the bitter, blindfolded crone” who “covered her eyes to share the fate of her blind husband” is juxtaposed in Adi Parva against the idea that Gandhari’s decision was “the ultimate protest” because “rather than be the eyes for them both, she shrouded both their worlds in the worst kind of self-inflicted darkness.”
Both Wagh and Patil eventually depart from Karve’s dogged loyalty to rational enquiry; their creative imaginations allow them to venture where Karve’s academic rigour could not.
Wagh’s Gandhari is born not of words alone but of dance movements and musical notes as well. Hitesh Dhutia, a guitarist who worked on the sound design of Rage and Beyond , says, “One of the notes in Hindustani classical music is called Gandhara. There are two kinds of Gandhara: a sharp one, and a flat one; a happier sounding one and a mellower one. Sanjukta wanted us to explore these sounds, and also incorporate elements of rock, blues and flamenco.”
Wagh says, “In rewriting and embodying Irawati’s Gandhari in movement, music, and text, I try to keep the pulse of this character alive in my moving body. Rage and Beyond is not just about the words Gandhari speaks, or Irawati speaks; this play is as much about the unsaid. The spoken text is used to connect the non-verbal elements of the play.”
In the play, aside from a few compositions based on classical ragas, Wagh also sings ‘Majhe Maher Pandhari’, an abhang attributed to saint-poet Eknath, dedicated to the deity Vitthal. The song has been incorporated into the play because, as Wagh says, “Irawati used to refer to Vitthal as her boyfriend.”
Wagh says that being a student of English Literature has taught her to discern ambiguities and contradictions within texts and real life experiences. “I am interested not only in Gandhari’s blindfold but in Irawati’s blindfolds too,” she says. “We all close our eyes to things we don’t want to see. There are times when the status quo is beneficial to us, so we want to maintain it. The defence mechanisms that you and I fall back on are also blindfolds. So many women do not even acknowledge that they are being violated; so many are not even aware that they are victims of injustice.”
In the epilogue to Adi Parva , Patil writes, “Cosmic tales are like fish tanks in their need for continuous aeration. Without the air of time and context continually bubbling through them, they are dead habitat, a crypt of code and guesswork, an oppressively heavy environment accessible only to academics with cumbersome diving equipment and breathing apparatuses...A story passed down through the ages via oral storytellers cannot help but alter. A good storyteller, like a good teacher, speaks in the language of the hour.”
Both Wagh and Chadha emphasise the need to examine canonical texts such as the Mahabharata from fresh perspectives instead of growing comfortable with moth-eaten meanings.
As Dr Chadha says, “Karve’s efforts at demystifying the Mahabharata, taking it out of the mythological and placing it in the sociological realm, are relevant to our times. Such attempts make us claim the epics for our contemporary understandings of our civilisation and our nation. What emerged as central for Sanjukta and I was the idea that we must all go beyond rage and violence, particularly of war, into empathy.”
Rage and Beyond: Irawati’s Gandhariwill be perfomed at Prithvi Theatre today, and on Friday March 18, at 9pm.
The author is a freelance writer
