INI AVAN: AN EXAMPLE OF THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND THE (DANGEROUS) POWER OF ART

INI AVAN: AN EXAMPLE OF THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND THE (DANGEROUS) POWER OF ART

The question of how to effectively engage with issues such as peace, justice and reconciliation is one that is proving both urgent and controversial in post-conflict Sri Lanka. Perhaps unsurprising, but definitely unfortunate there exist currently very few spaces for free and open debate. Where debate does occur it is often in the context of intense social divisions, strong hostility towards a perceived hypocrisy in international human rights and a national community which has experienced trauma, suffering and loss on all sides.

With this in mind I welcomed the recent invitation I received to participate in a film screening programme in eastern Sri Lanka. Having attended the programme before, I was pleasantly surprised by the open discussion and intelligent debate the films – dealing with a wide range of topics and from all over the world – generated. On this occasion I was also keen to see the film being shown: IniAvan. I had heard of Handagama’s reputation as a leading Sri Lankan film-maker and the topic - one man’s efforts to rebuild his life following rehabilitation as an ex-LTTE cadre – struck me as both an important and interesting one. Sadly I and the audience were to be deeply disappointed by what we saw (so much so that at least one participant went home angry enough to write his own review!). In what follows I would like to explain why I think this is a problematic film that requires us to reflect critically and deeply on the role that art and artists play in reconciliation and social justice processes.

For a start, I must state upfront that I reject any claim that a work of art can stand outside of its political or social context. This is even more so when the piece is not even attempting to disguise the particular location, people and time period it is seeking to represent. When dealing with current and highly sensitive issues it has to be the responsibility of the painter, poet, dramatist or film-maker to represent these with the utmost care and attention. It is this care that I found tragically lacking in IniAvan.

The film is extremely specific in terms of the characters and setting: the protagonist is an ex-LTTE cadre returning to his community in Jaffna following the rehabilitation process. He is met with distrust and even open hostility by fellow villagers. This, combined with difficulties finding work lead to him becoming involved in smuggling activities. We discover that those involved are men formerly known to him from his life as an LTTE cadre. Meanwhile, having rescued his childhood sweetheart from the social isolation of her life as a young widow (forcibly married to a man much older than her to avoid being recruited by the LTTE), his path becomes entwined with another woman: the abused wife of the security guard whose job he takes. With such subject matter it is understandable one would expect a very serious film.

However, while all of the issues raised are very serious and real, the film-making style fast becomes more reminiscent of mainstream south Asian cinema with highly stereotypical imagery (the violated young widow running in her wedding sari) and incongruously comical scenes (the opening bus ride, which also drags on for an excruciatingly long time). As one audience member put it: ‘it is not real nor surreal, which makes it unreal!’.  Meanwhile another astute member of the audience asked: what – if any – research did the film-maker do with the community he sought to portray? Certainly the audience – who were themselves from war affected communities, including a few from Jaffna – felt that the portrayal was more how the film-maker imagined the situation in the North of the country to be than a reflection of anything they recognised as their lived experiences.

This has the potential to begin a debate about whether an ‘outsider’ can ever accurately represent a community they study, observe or portray. This is not the argument I wish to make. Certainly as a foreigner doing research in Sri Lanka it would be highly hypocritical of me to suggest this was the case. I also believe that an outside perspective can be useful: sometimes we see more clearly when we are outside of our own ‘common sense’ world. However I will say that as an outsider I am extremely conscious of how I may be misreading or misrepresenting what I think I understand. It is this self-reflexivity that I find lacking in Handagama’s film. As a Sinhalese director making a film populated almost entirely with Tamil characters (I will return to the few Sinhalese characters later), I was left wondering what Handagama was seeking to achieve. From an artistic point of view, how did he go about crafting these characters: how did he imagine their inner-lives, their dreams, their feelings, their aspirations and their sorrows? From a social and political point of view, how did he expect his film would be received and contribute to the highly charged public discourse on the war and its aftermath?

For a start, I found Handagama’s female characters passive rather pathetic figures onto which all the exploitation and suffering traditionally associated with women in (and out of) war was cast. As a feminist activist and scholar I do not disagree with any of the issues he raises: the stigma of widowhood, caste discrimination, domestic violence, the horrors of displacement and the ongoing vulnerability to exploitation many women in conflict and post-conflict settings face. Rather, it is the way he portrays the issues that I find problematic. His female characters are simply not full people. They have no agency and very little personality.  This is in stark contrast to the many women I have met – both here in Sri Lanka and other post-conflict settings – who despite all the barriers, challenges and suffering they face display a remarkable resilience, strength and determination. The aim here is not to get into a war of representation: what does ‘the realTamil woman’s experience’ look like. It is instead a challenge to film-makers like Handagama and others to carefully reflect on whether their characters are in fact more than two-dimensional caricatures of emblematic figures. In a film like IniAvan this is important not only from the point of view of making a sophisticated and powerful film, it also has very real significance for how the public debate will come to terms with the legacies of three decades of war, the challenge of building a sustainably peaceful future and (maybe) addressing the root causes of the conflict in the first place.

It is not only in relation to his female characters that I find Handagama’s film troubling. Given the ongoing – albeit understandable – fragility of the relationship between Sinhalese and Tamil communities in Sri Lanka (I say understandable as both sides have experienced terrible suffering and the inevitable polarisation that occurs through war and the accompanying militaristic, nationalist propaganda produced both sides), it is puzzling to me why Handagama would not only not reflect on this in the film but in fact decide to cast the ‘friendly truck-driver’ offering assistance to the protagonist as Sinhalese while all the sources of conflict and suffering (the employer, abusive husband, hostile villagers, thugs) are Tamil. In doing so he not only opens himself up to accusations – which some of our audience made – of reinforcing Sinhalese nationalist propaganda, he misses an opportunity to explore one of the most important issues facing Sri Lankan society. It was also puzzling to me that there was so little commentary in the film on the protagonist’s experience of rehabilitation. While he seemed traumatised by some of his earlier associations with the LTTE he seems to have been completely unaffected by the end of the war and his interactions with the State. It may be his experience was entirely positive but one would expect it to at least in some way be reflected upon in the film, given that his return from rehabilitation is a pivotal feature of the story. Indeed we know virtually nothing of the protagonist’s views and his motivations and feelings are largely superficial.

If Handagama did not wish to contribute to current social and political debate with this film then he should have avoided entering such dangerous terrain. If his aim was to simply tell a story then he should not have so explicitly set it in such a highly charged context. In choosing to construct a story around such politicised figures as rehabilitated ex-cadres, Tamil war widows and refugees and Jaffna community members Handagama lost his right to abdicate political responsibility. This political responsibility should weigh heavily on him. If he was trying to make a beautiful film, he failed and in the process he did a disservice to the suffering of a community that has a lot of healing to do and a reconciliation process which will take a long long time if more nuance and sensitivity is not shown to how we go about imagining and representing the Other.

Dr. Kiran Grewal

Ohm Muththumari of Tamilnadu, India and his counterpart Pete Seeger!!! We lost both of them but NOT their spirit!!!

The Poetry Of A Jaffna Man

Text and Pictures By Imaad Majeed
Born and raised in Jaffna, S “Sopa” Pathmanathan is a poet and translator who has worked as a teacher for most of his life, serving as Principal of the Palaly Training College, from 1993 to 1996. He is currently the President of the Saiva Children’s Home, which falls under the purview of the Hindu Board of Education – an organization that provides food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education and vocational training to children affected by the 30 year conflict, those from broken homes, and those from families below the poverty line.
The rhythmic nuances of the written word first struck chord with Sopa, when, as a child, he listened to traditional religious discourse, or Kadaparagasangam, sung at the kovil; “To me, it was like watching an opera; I was possessed by the sonority and the rhythm, and so I began to write.”
Sopa’s poetry took a political angle around the 60s, with the elections that followed S W R D Bandaranaike’s assassination. “People were being taken for a ride.” He said, indignantly. In the 70s, his poems would become a satire on electioneering and on Tamil candidates.
“I have not written for the Tigers.” He declared, “They may have had a cause to fight for; I know that most Tamils felt the Tigers were justified in their actions as peaceful moves had failed.” But his concern was for the people caught in conflict. He claims he shares the psyche of the people, and is proud he did not run away. “Anyone who dons the uniform belongs to one caste and the gun is their symbol of authority. When the IPKF left in 1990, that vacuum was filled by the Tigers.”
The cover of his book of poetry, Vadakiruthal, depicts the scene of the October 1995 exodus of Waligamam when nearly five million were evacuated “wholesale” in the Riviresa Operation. “The Tigers could not contain the Army, and, so they said ‘Leave. Or stay and be butchered by the Army’,” The title poem asks which house has been demolished today, which bridge bombed, which mine blasted, which library burnt down, which child orphaned, which wife widowed, which woman defiled, which mother’s lament will be heard, and, tellingly, “where should we complain?”
“I have even written poems on the Government’s embargo on batteries, bicycle spare parts and fertilizer, these were times when being caught with two pen-torch batteries on your person would get you into serious trouble,” he said. “Even pharmaceuticals were withheld.”
He spoke of how the plays of Dr M Shanmugalingam gave expression to the anguish of the community caught in conflict. “I was convinced that it was the finest artistic expression of helplessness,” he said. “We were all witness to the struggle. It was not safe to express our feelings, at the time, as anyone could be mistaken for a militant.”, and described how it planted in him the urge to take on the task of translating Shanmugalingam’s work.
“At some points, I felt helpless, as he draws copiously from devotional and folk literature from the Tamil tradition. Folk idioms are difficult to translate.” He said.
Translations of poetry are a real challenge – as the famous quote from Robert Frost goes: poetry is what is lost in translation! Short stories, on the other hand, were not as challenging unless they made use of indigenous words, he claimed.
His translations have appeared in the Journal of South Asian Literature, and he has received the State Literary Award twice: in 2001, for his translation of African Literature to Tamil, and in 2011 for his translation of a Burmese monk’s tales. During the peace talks, Sopa worked on translation of Sinhala poetry by the Hiru Group, a project that stemmed from a meeting of writers from the North and South. Sopa’s original poetry, as well as his translations of Tamil poets, appears in Mirrored Images (2013), an anthology of Sri Lankan poetry edited by Rajiva Wijesinha.
While attempting the translation of African poetry, Sopa chose to parallel the metrics with traditional Tamil meter. “I would try to absorb the rhythm of the original, and find one closest to that within the Tamil metrics,” he said. With the writings of Sinhala poets, Sopa chose to glide into free-verse despite the original poems being in traditional form, because he felt the rhythm would suffer, as the poem had already lost some meaning between Sinhala and English. “In the traditional form, I could have created a good poem, but it would have deviated away from the original.” he said.
“A translation requires the translator to come to terms with the original idea of the creator. The discipline is to grasp, not to replace,”
Sopa was an upstart in the field of translation in the 80s, a time when, according to him, there was a dearth of trilingual persons. “The switch to the National Language in 1956 saw a decline in the use of the English language and far fewer multilingual persons – more so in Jaffna,” he said. When asked about Jaffna’s reading culture, Sopa expressed his concerns with the present generation’s fixation with the internet. “They are keen on studies, but those are the only books they touch.” He complained. “For 20 years, the students of Jaffna studied under kerosene lamps, and yet they remain illuminated. Now, with new and improved access to technology, very few visit the library. They are buried in the internet.”
Despite this, he said there was evidence a new generation of writers from Jaffna is actively publishing their work. “However, publishers are not willing to risk publishing poetry as it does not sell. I had to offer to purchase my own books from my publisher in order to convince them to take it on!” he said, adding sadly “There is no encouragement to pursue a literary career in Jaffna. You can recover part of your investment, if you win an award, but, you will be a loser in the long-run.”

Courtesy: Sunday Leader

Dr M. Shanmugalingam Defining Realism In Eastern Theatre

Born in 1931 to a Jaffna family, Dr M. Shanmugalingam grew up in Negombo till he was 10 years old. The family would visit Dankotuwa as Shanmugalingam’s father worked as an assistant superintendent at a coconut estate that belonged to the British. “We lived among working class Singhalese and Estate Indians even now, I feel it is my home. As a youth, I knew much about the Singhalese people and their nature. Every person is good to others, if not to their own,” Shan said, “Those days the Singhalese loved us as we did them.”
As a child, he had no real interest in drama. He did not participate in any cultural programmes throughout his education, not even to witness a sports meet.
“I can’t understand me. How can I understand the community of the nation if I cannot know me?” he asked. “Even now, I can just sit here without knowing anything.”
In 1950, a neighbour asked if Shan act in a play that was being produced for the Sinhala-Tamil New Year, as he had seen his imitation of an old man that milked the cow. “This old man had no teeth. I would place my lips on my teeth to emulate his voice; this is the technique that sealed my fate.”
For the next six years, Shan was typecast as an old man with no teeth.
Shan studied at Jaffna Hindu College. By the time he finished schooling, he had lost interest in studies. However, when a friend was to leave to India for higher studies, his mother pushed him to tag along. In 1953, he studied Inter-Arts at Mysore University, Bangalore and read for his degree at the University Of Madras where he graduated with a BA.
In 1957, Shan returned to Jaffna and became a teacher at the Sengudda Hindu College that was close to his home. He taught Tamil, English, Civics, Political Science and Hinduism and retired at the age of 56.
In 1958, he wrote a play.
“I do not know why. At the time, The Young Men’s Hindu Association would produce plays and I was involved in their literary circle,” he explained.
The play was titled ‘Arumai Nanbar’ (Dear Friend) and it was about attending school.
“There is too much stress placed on education,” according to Shan, “especially today. In Jaffna, there is a millionaire tuition teacher who profits from this stress.”
Shan considers himself, primarily, an actor.
“I acted under Kalaiarasu Swarnalingam whose brand of realism was influenced by the Madras director Pammal Sumbanthan Mudaliyar. Realism is a concept of the West, in Shan’s opinion, and, so, we cannot talk of realism in Eastern theatre. Hinduism and Buddhism say that life is not real. The body is a lie. What is real to us is unreal to others,” he explained.
Shanmugalingam would bring down Summbanthan’s plays to Jaffna. “I had the opportunity of acting with Swarnalingum in three plays in which he also directed.”
At the time, he explained, there was a craze that was called the ‘Cinema Culture’; people would celebrate the opening night of a new film. “A cousin of mine jumped off his balcony imitating a famous scene from an action film.”
The drama culture, on the other hand, could be categorized as follows. There were plays written in the South Indian style of scripting that covered social and historical topics without using colloquial language and instead, Senth – ‘pure’ – Tamil. Then, there was the imitation of Tamil cinema, from the style of performance to plagiarizing a whole cinema script on stage – complete with Indian accent. There were only a few who would write original plays in Jaffna Tamil colloquial tongue. “Last, but certainly not least,” he said, “there was improvised theatre. I feel that it was my experience with acting in improvised theatre that helped my playwriting.”
In 1976, Shan took up a course in teaching drama and theatre at the University of Colombo. Theatre had been introduced to the A level curriculum, and, so, a Diploma in Education was being offered. “It was during this time that I was exposed and influenced by Singhala theatre. I saw a children’s play, ‘Sathunge Punchi Gedara’ in 1976 produced by a German playwright and featured young Singhalese artists. There was song and dance. It was playful,” he said, “I was thrilled and flabbergasted.”
On January 23, 1978, together with his friend Thasisivam, Shan set up a school of drama and theatre in Jaffna. “I was not a born playwright, but now I had to write plays. I wrote ‘Kadi Velayadu Paapa’, a children’s play, heavily influenced by ‘Sathunge Punchi Gedara’. I was well received because thousand seats were sold out at the Veerasingham Hall.”
Those who were influenced by Western theatre criticized his plays by refusing to accept them as plays. Other critics said his theatre was not believable; they called it “South Indian scum”.
“The way in which I treated subject matter was distasteful to them.”
“There was a demand for more plays as we had a ‘rasigaravai’ (fan club) for whom we produced six plays each year for three years.”
A season ticket was sold at 15 rupees, and daily tickets were sold at five, three and two rupees; it was always ‘house-full’.
“We would start at 6.30PM sharp. Once, we had a festival and the Jaffna GA was the Guest of Honour. He was half a minute late, but the show had already begun. I could see people running to Veerasingham Hall. We were able to mobilize people,” he said.
“In 1983, when everything came down, we had to call the curtains.”
If there is no continuity, he explained, the people cannot be blamed for low attendance. There is a Tamil proverb that says ‘the God who gives will give through the roof’, “I interpret this as Cable Television. This is what we were destined for: South Indian scum.” (IM)

Courtesy: Sunday Leader

All you need is one actor willing to work his butt off and you have theatre Naseeruddin Shah

All you need is one actor willing to work his butt off and you have theatre

Naseeruddin Shah

As Naseeruddin Shah’s Motley group celebrates its 30th anniversary, he recounts his life’s journey to find a home in theatre

FOR ME, like cinema, theatre was a love born in a climate of opposition. My father, an officer in the Provincial Civil Services, was a stern and austere man who never had a car or fridge in the house. He wanted me to be a doctor and strive for conventional respectability. My need to act was anathema for him and I was always thought of as the doomed one: the boy who would amount to no good. It certainly looked like that for many years, but I couldn’t set aside my burning desire to act and be famous. This created extreme friction in the house — anger, condemnation, humiliation — but my impulse held good. It was like being possessed. I left home fairly early and it would be many years before my father and I would speak. He lived to see my first film, Nishant and liked it. But before we were entirely reconciled he died and that remains a big vacuum in my life. When he died, I brought home an old pair of his shoes, standard Bata Naughty Boy shoes that must now be at least 50 years old. I use those shoes sometimes in my plays and wonder quietly whether he is watching from somewhere.

My love for theatre was first seeded at St Joseph’s, my boarding school in Nainital. The school used to do a number of plays, operas really, that I considered immeasurably grand. By school standards, they were, in fact, quite sensational. I suffered untold misery in that school because I was a terrible student, always ostracised, and never given a chance to act on stage. But the plays mesmerised me. We were also exposed to great movies there. So my real education — the influences that shaped who I would become — basically lay in these plays and movies, these interludes when I could enter the skin of whoever I wanted to be. We also had an annual production staged by Geoffrey Kendall’s Shakespeareana. I consider Mr Kendall the greatest actor and man I have ever seen. He remains a guiding light for me. As I wrote in an earlier piece for TEHELKA, the spirit he brought to theatre inspired an almost religious awe. He always said, “I am not an actor or director, I am a missionary, and my mission is to spread Shakespeare.” There was an aspect of Mr Kendall’s productions that always intrigued me. The plays our school put up had elaborate cardboard sets – forests and rivers and faux drawing rooms. But the Kendalls never used any sets. They had plain black backdrops and appeared on stage with the simplest props: a chair, a hat. It was years – decades – before I understood why they did this, but when I did understand, I was delighted that my aesthetic journey had brought me independently to the same conclusion as old Mr Kendall.

After school, under duress, I went to college at Aligarh Muslim University. Here again, I was rescued from despair by a couple of teachers I am eternally grateful to. They introduced me to absurd theatre. Beckett. Chekhov. Shaw. There was, in particular, Zahida Zaidi, who not only made me read Waiting for Godot and Chairs and all these abstract plays I could make neither head nor tail of, but insisted I perform them. Staging Chairs in Aligarh can only be ranked as an act of supreme bravery or supreme folly. My attempt probably fell somewhere in between.

After Aligarh, there was the National School of Drama (NSD) and the magnificent Mr Alkazi with his lavish productions. I was totally blown away by the sheer spectacle. Ten people with mashaals climbing a rampart on stage, crowds moving in waves from one part of the stage to another. Not all of Mr Alkazi’s ideas were terribly original, but he brought sophistication and meticulous detail to the idea oftheatre production in India: there was attention to detail in every department, from the shoes and rings a character wore to the colour of leaves on a backdrop.

After NSD came FTII, the Film Institute in Pune, and theatre and I parted ways for about five years. Then, one day, Benjamin Gilani and I were sitting around on the sets of Junoon when he said, “I want to do a play with you, let’s try one.” Ben had studied at St Stephen’s and had been a big cat in its snobby Shakespeare Society, before going to the Film Institute dreaming of being a star. We had hit it off from the moment we met. We had similar tastes but were radically different in nature – which is probably why we are still friends decades later. That day, Ben suggested we try Waiting for Godot. I almost fell out of my chair. “Not that!” I protested, “I can’t understand a word of it.” But Ben insisted and so we launched into it. Tom Alter, Ben, Professor Taneja, our teacher from FTII, and I.

We spent a year reading it, performing it, just falling around. We watched a couple of performances for inspiration. Watching a good one in Gujarati really boosted our confidence. Godot in Gujarati: such things were possible. So, exactly 30 years ago, on July 29, 1979, we performed our first show of Godot. It was an unmitigated disaster. Wisely, we left it alone for six months, then returned to it. In those days, Om Puri had a group called Majma. We asked him to sponsor us and finally, after a year, we were invited to perform at Sophia College, Bombay. Two shows in front of 2,000 students. The reaction was amazing. For the first time, we felt we were on to a good thing. We had spent barely Rs 1,000 on our production: some hats, dirty rags, tattered shoes, a skeletal tree. What we earned was pure profit. And so out of that suspension of meaning — Godot — and christened by Ben, our group Motley was born. Over the years, Professor Taneja and Tom moved on, and Ratna [Pathak Shah], Ben, Akarsh Khurana and I came to be the core of the group.

We used to rehearse on the top of empty double decker buses or on local trains

TODAY MOTLEY productions staged abroad for NRI audiences — in Dubai, Muscat, Bonn, London, Amsterdam — sometimes earn $15,000 per show, and while none of us can still make a living from theatre, occasionally, we can afford generous cheques for the cast. But when we started out 30 years ago, NCPA had a little theatre that seated 50 and only patronised plays in Hindi. Apart from that, there was a tiny auditorium rented out by Chhabil Das High School in Dadar. All experimental theatre in Bombay – in Marathi, Gujarati or Hindi — was born here. This is where Arvind and Sulabha Deshpande started Avishkar; and actors like Nana Patekar and Rohini Hatangadi started out with them. We performed to audiences of 10 or 12 here and had nowhere to rehearse. While I was with Om’s Majma, we used to rehearse on the top of double deckers when they were empty, or on local trains in the afternoons, when no one was there. On an exceptional day, someone might put in a Rs 100 note in the hat. Most days, though, there were the ones and fives and tenners.

Today, there is a line of young people a mile long who want to join Motley. I tell them all, go away and do your own thing. Both the hardship and the passion involved in ‘getting it done’ drives one to find one’s language.

At Motley, very early, we decided we would do plays with very small casts. Apart from the difficulty in paying them, there was the difficulty of keeping a cast together. Om had attempted a play with barely eight people and he could never do two successive shows with the same cast. Inevitably, someone was ill or on a shoot or detained by an aunt in trouble! Ben wanted to do Arms and the Man. It needed only six people, but we could not afford the frills of a realistic play: a lady’s boudoir, a gentleman’s library with a grand bookcase. We weren’t Broadway, where was the money to come from. So we stuck to our little plays until the Alkazi dream lurking in me erupted and I decided to do Julius Caesar in 1992, co-directed by Vikram Kapadia. Motley’s reputation had been growing slowly and we had a cast of 70 (Kay Kay Menon was one of the extras in the crowd). We spent a lot of money, bought beautiful togas, but no one came to see it and it wrecked us financially. I had thought every school teaches the play and we would get a committed student audience. But only a bunch of teachers came on the second day and they were outraged because we had changed the play. I had ambitiously tried to turn the soliloquies into conversations, while retaining Shakespeare’s words. I had also changed the end. Blasphemous, they shouted at me, this is blasphemous!

After the shock of Julius Caesar, we did a play called Dear Liar with two actors. It’s been 20 years and that’s still alive. Godothas been alive 30 years, Ismat Aapa ke Naam for 10. Slowly, we have arrived at our own language.

Many years earlier, I had already started to weary of making commercial Hindi cinema. I found the films I was doing murderously boring. So in 1981, I spent Rs 35,000 of my hard earned money on getting to Poland to work with Jerzy Grotowski, a great theatreactor, director and teacher. I had devoured his Towards a Poor Theatre then and still think it is the most profound book on theatre I have ever read. Meeting him turned out to be a little disappointing but it set me off on a crucial path of discovery.

With dastangoi I finally feel I have found my home. I intend to do this for the rest of my life

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 thattheatre 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.

BUT THESE THINGS gradually distilled themselves in my head and Grotowski led me to understand what Mr Kendall had been doing all those years earlier. He had never had anything extraneous on set and yet it had been the most magical theatre I had ever seen. And so we embarked on the mode of storytelling that we have been doing ever since, where the word and the person speaking the word is all, and the form is completely austere. Motley productions never have any props for mere decoration. Our attempt is to create illusion in the audience’s mind. These are the aesthetics that have shaped our series of Ismat Chugtai, Manto and Mohan Rakesh stories, and, recently, the dastangoi.

With dastangoi, I finally feel I have found my home. Artistically, there is nothing more challenging and I intend to do this for the rest of my life. The last dastango, one of the greatest actors ever, died in penury selling paan. Mahmood Farooqui’s pioneering work in reviving this great art, which had withered away with the assault of cinema, is a gift I cannot thank him enough for. My encounter with dastangoi finally leached away the pleasure I had in the Alkazi kind of theatre. I do not dream of doing it anymore, I no longer enjoy even watching it.

My only dream now is to make Motley outlive me. Unfortunately, it has become solely associated with me, but I now want to do productions in which I am not on stage. I want people to associate Motley with quality productions, not Naseeruddin Shah. My children are going to be around 50 years after I am gone. I have to create a climate for them.

(Published in Tehelka Magazine, Volume 6 Issue 31, Dated August 8, 2009)