My encounter with Bombay theatre began in 1958, although theatre was by no means uppermost in my mind when I moved to the city. I had visited Bombay as a schoolboy on holidays, but then I was twenty and had come to the city with the serious intention of staying there for at least two years. I had graduated with mathematics from Karnataka University and although I loved pure mathematics, I had come to Bombay to register as a student in the Department of Statistics, for in those days that subject seemed to promise the best prospects for a good, solid job. It was barely ten years since the country had become independent and the air was buzzing with what the Five-Year Plans would do for the economy. P. C. Mahalanobis at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta was being hailed as one of the leading shapers of independent India and I wanted to be in the team with him. The specialization promised employment, a safe niche in the anticipated economic miracle, and I continued to cling on to the discipline, refusing to accept the aversion I soon developed for it, with disastrous consequences for my academic career.
Fortunately for me and my friend Ashok Kulkarni, who had come at the same time from Belgaum to join the Department of Economics, our departments were housed in the beautiful Rajabai Tower in the heart of Fort area. Ashok was as passionate about theatre as I was, and together we haunted every show, every spectacle, every performance, including junior-level boxing matches patronized by Parsi and Anglo-Indian youth, after, and often during, our class hours.
Bombay was alive with Marathi and Gujarati commercial theatre activity, and among all the plays we saw, I remember vividly Pu La Deshpande's delightful Tube Abe Tujapashi (To Each His Own). Which for its humour, its open structure, social satire and tongue-in- check nostalgia for medieval values, was admired as being at the forefront of innovative theatre in Marathi. The Gujarati theatre was obsessed with adaptations of Western thrillers like Dial M for Murder. And I much preferred Adi Marzban's Parsi Gujarati farces for their frenetic energy, although much of the verbal wit inevitably escaped me. Then there were visiting groups like Prithvi Theatres in whose elaborate melodramatic set pieces, the veteran Prithviraj Kapoor impressed one with his passionate Deruar (Wall) and embarrassed one with his sentimental Paisa (Money).
The Cold War was at its peak and the desperate efforts of the US and the USSR to impress the Third World with their cultural richness meant that we were free beneficiaries of some of the most precious cultural artefacts ceaselessly showered at our feet. With visiting orchestras, ballets, dance performances and exhibitions like the Family of Man, a whole new sensuous world was being offered to us, altering almost every one of our received notions about the arts. I remember Saryadev Dubey recounting how his entire understanding of choreography was altered by a single visit to Martha Graham's rehearsals, organized by Ebrahim Alkazi for the members of the Theatre Unit.
Experimental Theatre: What Was That?
It is generally held that the sixties and seventies were decades of experimentation in theatre worldwide. It is also held that this surge of experimentation was impelled by the historical-political-social circumstances that obtained at the time. I came into theatre in the seventies when the Chhabildas School in Mumbai had offered its auditorium to Awishkar-the newly established theatre group-to rehearse and perform its plays. Awishkar then invited other groups also to perform there and so Chhabildas became a meeting place for young people who wished to do a theatre that was different from the dominant theatre of the times. Whether there is anything to the theory of the impulse for experimentation having come from socio-political forces is debatable. But it would appear that having an affordable space to rehearse and perform was a basic need for this kind of theatre to happen. In the following discussion, I shall not comment on what happened in theatre when spaces like the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute and the Walchand Terrace space offered similar facilities to theatre practitioners. I shall confine myself to where my participation in theatre as a playwright began-the Chhabildas School Hall in Mumbai-and to Marathi theatre, in particular.
The first question that presents itself to me is this: was Chhabildas indeed the centre for experimental plays in the seventies and eighties? Because finally, Vijay Tendulkar's Ghathiram Korwal, undoubtedly experimental in every sense of the word, could never have been performed at Chhabildas. Many of the statements made by directors actors and designers in the last section of this oral history will bear me out. The desire to do a different kind of theatre, which is what most so-called experimental work might reasonably have claimed for itself, came out of the stagnation of themes, performance styles and production design that had come about in the mainstream theatre. The urge to do theatre was strong and yet theatre was dead. So this was a time of interesting tension.
Another circumstance that gave shape to the desire to do a different kind of theatre was that there was an entire generation present then which understood and could use language as literature, as dramatic dialogue and as pure experimentation. This generation related to society and politics through language. Its natural cultural expression was Marathi. Naturally, it had the capacity to fulfill its urge to play with art also through Marathi. Perhaps not consciously, but unconsciously, a class of leaders had emerged in the theatre world which was fully in command of its linguistic and cultural roots.
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