Naseeruddin Shah’s fascination with Ismat Chughtai is evident in Aurat!Aurat!Aurat! ( Ismat Apa ke Naam 3 ). Motley, a theatre group from Mumbai, helmed by Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah’s work brings alive the utterly feminist world of Ismat Chughtai, an Indian Urdu language writer from the 1930s who wrote on female sexuality and feminism. The play, a series of monologues, is enacted by an all-female cast and will open The Hindu Theatre Fest 2018.
Directed by Naseeruddin Shah, this play comprises selections from Chughtai’s autobiography and three other writings ( Ek Shauhar ki Khaatir, Aadhi Aurat Aadha Khwab, and Soney Ka Anda ), which are “essays or ruminations rather than stories”, as Shah says.
You’ve dabbled with Chughtai’s work, over and over again. What’s your fascination with Ismat Chughtai?
I just can’t have enough of her writing; in my dreams I write like her and the characters peopling her stories all seem like members of my extended family, I feel I know them all. I had a grand aunt who dragged herself around the entire village on all fours turning up (by chance!) at different houses exactly at mealtimes; a miserly grand uncle who kept money hidden in the rafters of his house only to one day see a pigeon flying away with a hundred rupee note in its beak… Such people were only sources of merriment for us as children, but Ismat’s acute observation and compassionate recreation of human behaviour has helped me understand them better.
In its title, Aurat, Aurat, Aurat!, clearly establishes its premise and preoccupation; that it concerns itself about women and womanhood. You also have an all-female cast. Tell us about it.
Motley’s casting was becoming a bit predictable always with Ratna, Heeba and myself as the focus. So I decided it was time for a change and a need for new faces. I had a gorgeous group of people (who all incidentally happen to be female) who were available and did a fabulous job not only in their performances but also in pulling together as a team. Seema Pahwa, for instance, who I am a huge admirer of was the first to be cast; the others fell into place. I am lucky to have such a wonderful set of actors and a genius lighting designer in Arghya Lahiri.
The play is based on a series of stories from Chughtai’s work; what about the relevance of these stories?
I hate that tired word “relevance”. What prompted me to choose these stories was sheer chance. I hadn’t read them earlier and then I heard them read out on YouTube and it occurred to me that together they’d make a capital theatrical experience. To stage stories, I don’t always choose those with a common thread or theme. I go by the beauty of the writing and what the story is trying to say (the experience for the viewer should be like reading a collection of stories) but this time by happenstance the common thread just happened.
Talk to us about the lens through which you perceive the work of a woman which is about women and their state in society and that is enacted by women? What goes into that process?
Well, I’d love to be called a feminist but I hate labels. As a child I witnessed much misogynistic behaviour in my family. For quite a few years, I thought, this is the way of the world. I think it was Shaw whose vision of the life force residing in the woman made a difference to my thinking and then of course I was hit by the double whammy of Ghalib and Ismat, with Faiz thrown in for good measure. Schooled in English I had till then only contempt for my own language Urdu which, in my ignorance, I considered the language of shallow poetry about broken hearts and wine cups.
Faiz and Ghalib, I realised later, belong in a higher pantheon than Shakespeare and TS Eliot and reading Ismat was a revelation. Her compassion for every living creature she writes about cleansed my views on several prejudices regarding women and people in general. I’d say she introduced me not so much to the concept of feminism but humanism. And of course its very flattering to have a bunch of lovely women hanging on to your every word!
The play in Hindustani will be staged on August 10 at Sir Mutha Venkatasubbarao Concert Hall, Harrington Road, Chetpet at 7.30 pm.
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