By Express News Service
The Mahabharata was not a textual content that I might come to, naturally or in any other case. But unusual as it could appear, the textual content with all its epic-textuality and granularity got here to me, not as soon as however twice over. In the type of a narrative that Mahasweta Devi, an previous good friend and co-traveller, wrote and got here to relate the pre-published draft to me. The story of a robust, gritty tribal lady — Dopdi Maji. Here, Mahasweta turns the disrobing of the gorgeous and argumentative Draupadi within the Kaurava court docket on its head, and transmorphs it amidst the tribal boondocks of jap India. Later, I used to be to immerse myself in that dense, multi-layered textual content as I labored on its translation from Bangla to English by my different previous good friend, the redoubtable Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak.
However, a lot earlier than that, the Mahabharata textual content had accosted me as soon as, by way of iconic theatre ideologue and director Peter Brook and the textual content he used, the play by French novelist-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere. I had identified and adopted Brook’s work in theatre from his early dabblings in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade and examine his somewhat controversial manufacturing of Strauss’s one-act opera, Salome, with Dali doing the units to his experimentation with the type of theatre, one thing that all the time deeply me. Here was a person who had directed the legendary British stage actor John Gielgud, breaking the mould repeatedly by his experiments on theatre. (His movies acquired some popularity and following too, however they had been comparatively extra staid and secure in comparison with what he was doing in theatre).
By the time the time I received a name from the British Council, Calcutta (that was how my metropolis was identified then), telling me that Brook and Carriere had been coming to analysis and collect materials on indigenous Indian artwork kinds nonetheless practising the tales of Mahabharata, and likewise Ramayana — and will I assist them? — I, frankly, was in two minds. I had certainly travelled to maybe each potential nook and nook of India to observe our indigenous theatre kinds — in all their splendour and richness, held aloft amidst the sheer wrestle for existence in opposition to poverty. Trying to grasp their potential genealogies and hyperlinks with different performing arts had been my life’s work.
Peter Brook 1925-2022
There could be solely a uncommon theatre persona or troupe on this land that I didn’t know of and never interacted with or a minimum of watched. Documenting, as I used to be, a category struggle of a distinct form, between the elitist threatre certain by the proscenium, funded by state our bodies, and the theatre on the market…performing outdoors the arclights, localised but unusually common, holding onto their highly effective efficiency aesthetics by tales historic and modern. I may simply take Brook and Carriere round showcasing the perfect and essentially the most nuanced.
But ought to I? I requested myself. I had by then a definite view on the world theatre troupe he had put collectively, delving into the theatres of Africa, East Europe and now India. It was just like the jazz that was performed within the Sixties, virtually taking it to stage of classical music, however then cherry-picking on world music to brighten itself, with out truly cracking the code and the context of the music the place it existed and got here from. Should I be a part of such a purchasing expedition of cultures? Ultimately, my previous Parsi good friend at Calcutta BCL, Zarine Choudhury, an excellent theatre artiste and feminist in her personal proper, and my urge to share Indian theatre with a bigger world viewers triumphed. I gave in and the journey started.
Right firstly of our conversations, Brook had fairly truthfully made it clear that he was not trying a lot into an Indian textual content, however a civilizational textual content about human needs, intrigues, energy video games, politics, all that made up human existence. I took the Brook-Carriere crew to observe, over a two-days-one-night journey, the three Chhaus: Mayurbhanj, Seraikela and Purulia, in that order, the order of their origins. We had as our information the sensible singer-anthropologist Dr Pashupati Mahato. My early misgivings about these subject survey quickies hit me within the face on the very first cease, the small Mayurbhanj village the place the whole village elders, younger women and men, and youngsters stood in reverential silence watching the dancer mendacity down, being painted up with stripes, strokes and dots throughout his naked physique.
Brook was impatient, “Why are they not ready yet? Still putting on his makeup?” He was fairly impolite as a matter of reality. I needed to take him apart and inform him, “The performance has begun. The decoration of the dancer-hunter’s body is the village’s investment in their representative’s venture into the forest, risking his life to bring them their daily food. It’s no performance, but a total social act that’s begun, and hence the holy silence.” The two days we spent watching the Chhaus of their places, first in that the village beside the forest, then the Seraikela palace, after which with the mask-makers of Purulia, was a studying of dance historical past that Brook and firm slowly got here to phrases with. I stepped off the caravan after that ceremony of initiation, furnishing them with a roadmap.
Next cease for them was Manipur, the place Ratan Thiyyam and Kanhaiyalal and his spouse, the legendary actress Savitri, had been doing their theatre. Moulding the tales of Mahabharata to inform their very own tales on stage — of identification and artwork, sharpened as a creative protest in opposition to mainland Indians. Brook and Carriere had been onto fairly a journey — getting fairly surprised and overwhelmed within the course of. I stored affected by an intense inside debate on having been a part of a semi-colonial Colombus mission. Anyway, how may that exploration be full with out Kathakali? They had been quickly on the doorstep of the legendary Kalamandalam Gopi. Brook was left speechless. He would later say that in Kathakali he discovered the best and most ‘authentic’ instantiations of Indian artwork.
My tryst with the Brook-Carriere Mahabharata was not over but. I, sadly, couldn’t journey to France to observe the primary spectacular staging of the Mahabharata. Brook wouldn’t disappoint, although. He was coming to India with the eight-hour-long movie he made, primarily based on the manufacturing. Again I used to be known as upon. This time, by my pricey good friend Vijaya Mehta, from the Marathi theatre world. Brook needed to conduct a theatre workshop in Calcutta, to be adopted by the screening of his movie. And I used to be to be anchor-host for the ‘event’ . You couldn’t say no to Vijaya.
And what higher place than Nandan? It all occurred with the precision and elan (and sleepless nights for his associates) that Brook is understood for. Mrinal Sen, Mahasweta, Nabaneeta Dev Sen — all of the legends of my metropolis descended not simply to observe the movie, but additionally participate within the workshop with Brook, Carriere and the entire Mahabharata troupe. A big, chosen group of college college students too had been drafted in. Brook was taken to process, fairly actually. Was there a racial overtone in his manufacturing? Why was Bhima dark-skinned? And Arjuna and particularly Krishna aloof, mental and white-skinned?
Brook was a thinker, even a thinker, within the theatre world. Whatever textual content he produced on stage or on display, from Shakespeare to Mahabharata, he sought to create a brand new idiom with a sort of starvation that maybe got here naturally to a boy born to Latvian Jewish immigrants, rising up in working-class Birmingham — a starvation that took within the bleak existentialism of a Sartre, the profound disruptions of an Antonin Artaud, and the absurdism of Beckett as if a pure receptacle for them.
Just earlier than leaving Calcutta, my copy of Carriere’s textual content on the Mahabharata had acquired a novel autograph — Carriere did a pen sketch of Ganesha, with a observe saying, ‘where it all began’. It was potential for me to rationalise it in any case: maybe my journey with them was not totally a waste. Culture all the time lives in a spot between belonging and journeying. And if not anything, they a minimum of understood the place all of it begins when a conventional Indian play is staged!
Samik Bandyopadhyay
The author is a scholar on artwork, aesthetics and cultural research
