Trust Punjabi theatre legend, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award winner and Padma Shri awardee Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry to treat the world as her stage. And to make personal connections with literary texts from diverse sources. In 2007, she had brought to the Theatre Festival, a searing Punjabi adaptation of South African writer Can Themba’s The Suit, a three page story about infidelity, psychological violence and marital politics. She has also directed Ariel Dorfman’sNachiketa Liberetto for the Opera Circus in London. And her relationship with Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala is now part of theatre history. Over 27 years in theatre later, she has simplified her creative process to this, “When you read a text, something should happen within.” So what was it that drew her repeatedly to Karnad’sNagamandala, first in 2004 and now again?
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Her latest adaptation was staged recently at Ranga Shankara and she says, “The idea of revival is tricky in theatre because a production gets dated and dies. The text survives though sometimes as in this case. And each time when I deal with Nagamandala, I negotiate a complex space where myth addresses the present and we confront questions about power, man woman relationships, jealousy, fragility of mind and spirit. The play has pan Indian images. The snake for instance is a symbol of awakening, of sensuality, Kundalini, desire. I asked myself this time, ‘Does the play still talk to me?’ It does. When a story lays bare fundamental emotions, the questions about contemporaneity cease to exist. A mysterious alchemy takes place.”
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And then, she says, there is also the collision between the real and the unreal, the concrete and the capricious, darkness and light, a post modern edginess and open-ended ambiguity.
She smiles, “So this time too, Nagamandala spoke to me though I had to wipe the slate clean of memories of the past production and start afresh. It was a challenge but then I never feel that I cannot take on something tough and I never fear falling flat on my face. Be it working with Opera Circus or doing this play again. If you are open-minded and receptive, many things can happen.” Be it theatre or life, she says, fixed notions and rigidity do not work. And that is why when she was asked by a member of the Ranga Shankara audience in 2007 whether any Indian man would take back his unfaithful wife like the protagonist of The Suit had, she had said, “I really don’t care.”
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She picks stories not about morality but the mysterious manner in which human beings react to each other and circumstances. She says, “Choices are complex and not linear. And every story should have a latent question/questions and something that resonates with me and through me.. with the audience. And every play is an opportunity to raise questions, unlock answers, find a new way to relate to life.”
Strangely though she has never actively interacted with Karnad while working with Nagamandala. She smiles, “That is something I have never really, surprisingly thought about. A literary text becomes a performance text after improvisations and you can’t keep going back to the playwright with your version. Also when a play travels to another language (and not all plays travel well), it acquires the flavour of a region, its cultural history, idioms and music. It is tossed, churned, reinvented. The play loses bits of its old self and acquires something new. Like spices and silk, culture travels too! Though if I were to translate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard in Punjabi, it would not work.”
She picks stories not about morality but the mysterious manner in which human beings react to each other and circumstances. She says, “Choices are complex and not linear. And every story should have a latent question/questions and something that resonates with me and through me.. with the audience. And every play is an opportunity to raise questions, unlock answers, find a new way to relate to life.”
Strangely though she has never actively interacted with Karnad while working with Nagamandala. She smiles, “That is something I have never really, surprisingly thought about. A literary text becomes a performance text after improvisations and you can’t keep going back to the playwright with your version. Also when a play travels to another language (and not all plays travel well), it acquires the flavour of a region, its cultural history, idioms and music. It is tossed, churned, reinvented. The play loses bits of its old self and acquires something new. Like spices and silk, culture travels too! Though if I were to translate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard in Punjabi, it would not work.”
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She does not think much about being the lone radical voice of Punjabi theatre. She says, “When I work in the isolation of my Chandigarh studio, I am detached from the historical value of what I have done or am doing. I work like a collaborator with others.There is no hierarchy. What matters is how we pull subtext out of a story. A writer may be a pusillanimous being who simply writes, ‘he walks in.’ But as a director, I have to show, where he came from and where he will go. I have to create pauses and silences.”
Neelam may not have envisaged the high notes and the pauses in her own journey as the Artistic Director of her own theatre outfit The Company but there is more on her mind than just theatre today. She is mourning the demise of UR Ananthamurthy, the three decades without closure that have passed after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the shrinking of spaces where dissent can be voiced. Her parents were victims of Partition and she says, “the sense of alienation within one’s own country did not end with Partition. It happened again during 1984 when my sister had to go in hiding in Delhi and my children were not invited to a birthday party. When Sikh men cut off their hair to save their lives.”
She does not think much about being the lone radical voice of Punjabi theatre. She says, “When I work in the isolation of my Chandigarh studio, I am detached from the historical value of what I have done or am doing. I work like a collaborator with others.There is no hierarchy. What matters is how we pull subtext out of a story. A writer may be a pusillanimous being who simply writes, ‘he walks in.’ But as a director, I have to show, where he came from and where he will go. I have to create pauses and silences.”
Neelam may not have envisaged the high notes and the pauses in her own journey as the Artistic Director of her own theatre outfit The Company but there is more on her mind than just theatre today. She is mourning the demise of UR Ananthamurthy, the three decades without closure that have passed after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the shrinking of spaces where dissent can be voiced. Her parents were victims of Partition and she says, “the sense of alienation within one’s own country did not end with Partition. It happened again during 1984 when my sister had to go in hiding in Delhi and my children were not invited to a birthday party. When Sikh men cut off their hair to save their lives.”
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Her eyes mist slightly and she adds, “There can be no closure to such pain. It is easy to say, ‘move on.’ But those who say it did not have a son massacred. a daughter raped. But then the historical map of post independence India is shameful. What happened in 2002 in Gujarat is also my business as are the the riots in Muzzafarnagar. As a human being and a story teller, it is all my business. These schisms. This violence. And we must collectively be watchful of political manipulations in a country totally insensitive to its citizens and to tragedy. A country where Rs lakh is given as compensation in a distasteful way to those who have lost everything.”
Her eyes mist slightly and she adds, “There can be no closure to such pain. It is easy to say, ‘move on.’ But those who say it did not have a son massacred. a daughter raped. But then the historical map of post independence India is shameful. What happened in 2002 in Gujarat is also my business as are the the riots in Muzzafarnagar. As a human being and a story teller, it is all my business. These schisms. This violence. And we must collectively be watchful of political manipulations in a country totally insensitive to its citizens and to tragedy. A country where Rs lakh is given as compensation in a distasteful way to those who have lost everything.”
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As a feminist and a woman, she does not know also just when the gender violence in India will recede. She observes, “It comes from patriarchy, from the ‘woman is property’ notion, from misogyny that considers a woman good enough only to serve the libido, from the obsession with the male child, from lack of education, from the disparity between too less and too much. The rape of children in Bangalore is shocking, Yet even in something as twisted and dark as the December 2012 tragedy in Delhi, I saw a shift in the way Nirbhaya said, ‘I want to live.’ This was so courageous, so powerful a statement in a country where rape is equated with death. There is a crack in our national character and I don’t know what kind of Amrit Manthan will cleanse us of this poison.”
As a feminist and a woman, she does not know also just when the gender violence in India will recede. She observes, “It comes from patriarchy, from the ‘woman is property’ notion, from misogyny that considers a woman good enough only to serve the libido, from the obsession with the male child, from lack of education, from the disparity between too less and too much. The rape of children in Bangalore is shocking, Yet even in something as twisted and dark as the December 2012 tragedy in Delhi, I saw a shift in the way Nirbhaya said, ‘I want to live.’ This was so courageous, so powerful a statement in a country where rape is equated with death. There is a crack in our national character and I don’t know what kind of Amrit Manthan will cleanse us of this poison.”
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She also senses that a subterranean darkness is surfacing and taking over what was supposed to be a progressive, pluralistic country. “Yes, there are lesser spaces for debate and dissent because you no longer know how your political views will be received,” Neelam says.
She also senses that a subterranean darkness is surfacing and taking over what was supposed to be a progressive, pluralistic country. “Yes, there are lesser spaces for debate and dissent because you no longer know how your political views will be received,” Neelam says.
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And that is why she misses UR Ananthamurthy because he was a, “fearless man who spoke his truth without being strident.’ She says, “The stalwarts are leaving us one by one.”
Coming to Bengaluru always makes her happy though and she says,” I think Ranga Shankara is the nicest theatre space in the country. I love the cafe and the discipline that is observed as people queue up quietly.”
And that is why she misses UR Ananthamurthy because he was a, “fearless man who spoke his truth without being strident.’ She says, “The stalwarts are leaving us one by one.”
Coming to Bengaluru always makes her happy though and she says,” I think Ranga Shankara is the nicest theatre space in the country. I love the cafe and the discipline that is observed as people queue up quietly.”
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And something about the city always surprises her even though she has seen little of it. This time, a day before Nagamandala’s performance, she received the news that she had become a grandmother. She will now always associate the city with new beginnings.
And something about the city always surprises her even though she has seen little of it. This time, a day before Nagamandala’s performance, she received the news that she had become a grandmother. She will now always associate the city with new beginnings.
portrait credit: VIRGINIA RODRIGUES.
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be.
Reema I watched this. It was a tender and liberating interpretation. Had the true Punjabi flavour of underlying sadness. A remarkable production.
Thank you for bringing us the layers beneath.
Lina