Naseeruddin Shah on Theatre and Dastangoi

Naseeruddin Shah on the theatre group
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These days I have been reading some of the plays written by Singapore playwright and director Elangovan. He often goes for very provocative themes (The Gandhis of India being the subject of his latest production) which sometimes lands his plays in unsavoury situations. Most of his plays have politics for theme which is always interesting but a risky exercise. I assume that he enjoys that element of risk and provocation in his creative work--he is an adventure sportsman of theatre, if I may say so. And when I say this, I'm not being mean or disparaging.

His plays, I found, are rich in information but that makes them very verbose (he would have made a great investigative journalist). I don't know how his actors manage to deliver their lines as dialogues in his plays sometimes run to several paragraphs or even more than a page! A tough act! Nevertheless, his plays are important because they record things that nobody else will say or write.

But this post is not about him or his plays. Maybe I will write about that in future. What I want to relate here is that in Singapore, I got the opportunity to watch some theatre, follow some action in this line and I intend to keep doing that.

I had very little exposure to good theatre in school or even in college. At Aligarh, some of my friends were doing theatre but I hardly went to see any. I wanted to join theatre in college but unfortunately I did not read the list of selected candidates for the drama group@JNU and lost my chance. Never tried again. I was too lazy or too worried about my career. So, Mumbai, you are one 'struggler' less. More on that some other time again.

This post is about a man, an actor, who I have always admired. One of India's greatest actors, Naseeruddin Shah reminisces his past and present engagement with theatre as an art form, in a personal piece in Tehelka. Here, he reveals his love and respect for Geoffrey Kendall and his group Shakespeareana. In this piece, he also talks about Jerzy Grotowski, a great theatre actor, director and teacher whose style of theatre expounded in his book Towards a Poor Theatre greatly influenced Naseer:

Grotowski had extreme contempt for Broadway. Theatre can never match cinema’s illusion, so why was it competing to be the same? He asked three big questions: Is what theatre could do being done better than cinema? The answer was no. Then what was it that theatre used to do before the advent of cinema? And third, where had theatre sprung from? Theatre, he said, began with man’s need to communicate, not to dazzle. And in order to communicate, you don’t need huge castles disappearing on stage and helicopters and gondolas. The essential magic of theatre was to stimulate the imagination. Our poverty of resources should be our strength, not our weakness, he argued. If you remove everything extraneous – sets, lights, props, costumes – all you need is one actor in a black suit willing to work his butt off, and you have theatre. When you have two people who meet and talk, you have theatre. In his later life, Grotowski extended this argument so far, he began to dispense even with dialogue. He went on a different trip, searching for the primal state and sound. Theatre became synonymous with life – to a point where you couldn’t get a straight answer from him to any question, like what time of day it was.

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Now, Naseer wants to stick to Dastangoi. I am eager to see him do it--I hope his group performs in Singapore in future. View this dastangoi clip (the only one I could find on Youtube) and tell me what you think of it. Do you also think that something like this could have inspired the great Dev Anand to speak the way he does (he delivers his dialgoues in a trademark Dev Anand style) or vice versa? I don't mean any disrespect to anyone but that's what came to my mind when I saw it.

Firaaq (2008)

I want to applaud Nandita Das to have chosen a complex theme—the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots—for her directorial debut, Firaaq (2008). As a (co)writer-director, her heart is certainly in the right place but the film as a narrative (structurally) does not work for me.

The four or five story tracks, all dealing with one or other aspect of the Gujarat riots, muddle the flow of the narrative. The problem is not with the editing or how the sequences segue into each other but with the choice of the stories and their episodic nature. Each story seems to be a stand alone piece. As the narrative progresses, they all hurtle towards climaxes of their own, frittering away the combined tension (and its resolution) that could have resulted had they all converged into a confluence. Would that be too tricky or clichéd (a la Priyadarshan)? That is certainly debatable.

The tracks themselves are fascinating on their own. I loved the Naseeruddin Shah/Raghuvir Yadav track. Naseer plays the Muslim musician’s character with so much depth and dignity. The portrayal was so poignant (especially the conclusion where Naseer finally admits: Music does not have the power to transcend such great communal hatred). To which Yadav’s character, the ever so scared and paranoid Muslim assistant, says: If you start thinking like this, what hope is there for people like me?

While watching the film, I was as aghast as Naseer’s character was when we found out that Wali Dakhni’s grave had been razed and a road had been built on that ground by the government of Gujarat. If Wali, a part of our history and heritage, is not important in India, then what place is there (in modern India) for insignificant souls like me?

The Deepti Naval/Paresh Rawal track is saved by the small boy whose haunting eyes ask all viewers at the end of the movie: what wrong did I do? Why is my present pathetic and future bleak? Why am I in a ghetto? Gosh, who can stand those innocent searching eyes?

The Tisca Chopra/Sanjay suri track (the use of a neutral name Samir in a communally charged city, Hindu Muslim marriage) was interesting. What Samir does at the end really required a lot of balls. In real life, as a Muslim, it would be hard for me to admit what he admitted. The autodriver and his wife’s track is perhaps the most muddled one. So many things happen to them on screen and yet their characters are not that well developed. The director also shows a little weakness in executing some scenes in this episode.

Firaaq means separation in Urdu. The film shows the separation of the two communities—Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat. Where are the villains who are creating this communal rift, who control the mechanics of the flow of hatred in the birthplace of Gandhi? The film does not ask this question and that perhaps has enfeebled this entire project. But, honestly, I can’t even blame Nandita for not taking this route to tell her story. Till today, even after the Tehelka expose, the Godhra incident remains an unsolved mystery and many of the perpetrators of the Gujarat communal carnage still remain unpunished. Nandita Das , through the depiction of the human condition in her film, reminds us of the injustice of Gujarat, a witness to her moral strength, courage, sense of justice and noble-mindedness.

Honest work

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first Pakistani film to be released in India, Khuda Ke Liye. According to the reports, the film has been doing well--which is a good sign as it is supposed to be a thought-provoking film ( I have not seen it yet--will have to wait for the DVD).

Writing about the film, Tavleen Singh notes in her column in The Indian Express:

What interested me most about the film was that in seeking to show Islam in a good light, it accidentally exposes the prejudices that make moderate Muslims the ideological partners of jihadis. In painting America as the villain of our times, the prejudices against the West that get exposed are no different from what Mohammad Siddique, one of London's tube bombers, said in the suicide video he made before blowing himself up. In the video, that surfaced during the trial now on in London, he describes himself as a soldier in the war against the West: 'I'm doing what I am for Islam, not, you know, for materialistic or worldly benefits.'

In Khuda Kay Liye, the prejudices against India come through as well. The hero, when he lands in Chicago, finds that his future wife does not know that Pakistan is a country. When he tries to explain where it is geographically, he mentions Iran, Afghanistan and China before coming to India. It happens that India is the only country she knows and Taj Mahal the only Indian monument she has heard of. 'We built it,' says our hero, 'we ruled India for a thousand years and Spain for 800.' As an Indian, my question is: who is we? Those who left for Pakistan or the 180 million Muslims who still live in India? If we pursue this 'we' nonsense, we must urge the Indian Government to bring back Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and Taxila. And that is only the short list.

Pedaram sultan bood. My father was a sultan. That attitude belongs to the past. But unfortunately, some people still love to live in the past's reflected glory.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the observations of Naseeruddin Shah, one of the actors in this film. He is India's one of the finest actors and has acted in this film. Why he chose to do this film? He gives a very honest account of it:

We were not fanatics, but I had been brought up in a very orthodox home. My mother’s only solace and source of pleasure was prayer. As children, we were all taught to read the Quran but not to understand it. I remember even then that as the maulvi interpreted the holy text, I thought it ridiculous. His interpretations were full of fire and brimstone and talk of kafirs doomed for hell. I had many Hindu and Christian friends, who I knew to be very good fellows, and I wondered why they must suffer while we Muslims, no matter what we did, would only suffer a mild purgatorial period before we were all accepted into a sylvan heaven. According to him, everything was haraam: music, watching films, wearing western clothes, shaving, drinking, growing hair above the lips.

All of this bothered me intensely. What is the azaan but music; what is the recitation of the Quran but music? Did our holy book really condemn our women to look like penguins, deformed and shapeless in uniform black? The maulvi had 13 children: how were they to be reared? That is what should have been worrying him instead of all his talk of the afterlife.

Those two pages I read of Khuda ke Liye hooked me. They expressed everything I felt about my religion and culture. It was neither devout nor dismissive. It was an argument for what I believed in. I said yes immediately.

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