Bhaskar Roy Barman
Modern Indian English Drama
I should like to talk about modern Indian drama written in English with a particular emphasis on two plays by Nissim Ezekiel. Before doing so, I think it is worthwhile to trace the history of drama writing in India, I shall limit this discussion to drama having been written since independence. Every play should be tasted on stage as drama so as to be connected to theatre. Theatre in pre-independence period and theatre in post-independence period differ, but the difference does not lie in the disappearance of drama after 1950; it lies in the multidimensional assimilation of drama to literature and of literary drama to performance. Post-independence playwrights who are historically first group of dramatic authors in India belong simultaneously to the print and performance and produce serious and successful work in both modes. The specifically literary aspect of this integration comprises of a new model of authorship and textuality that explains the development of the conception of play as a private textual act that can be dissociated, though in principle, from production, performance and the institutional constraints of theatre. Besides, literariness gives legitimacy and currency unto plays as printed texts and makes plays-as-texts susceptible to analysis, commentary and interpretation outside the boundaries of performance.
Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Girish Karnad, Mohit Chattopadhyay are among the post-independence playwrights who attempt to define the first post-independence model of dramatic authorship and approach playwriting as a verbal act and mode of self –expression potentially connected to theatrical praxis. They fashion their literary selves on a complete range of local, regional, national and international influences relating to the available traditions of realist, modernist and political writing and the creations of majority of the playwrights owe themselves to a variety of print genres. They all represent the first model of authorship. Nissim Ezekiel,a well-established poet occasionally writing plays may be put in this first model group.
The second model of authorship includes such figures as Vijay Tendulkar, Satish Alekar and Chandrashekhar Kambar. These figures, while maintaining equally strong literary identities, involve themselves with specific theatre groups as resident playwrights, directors and actors. Thanks to their active involvement with the media of theatre, film and television, their profiles differ from those of the playwrights belonging to the first model, but their literary inclination dominates over their inclinations towards directing and acting, as is evident in Vijay Tendulkar’s oft-quoted pronouncement, ‘I am first a writer and then a playwright.’ But what is common to both the models is the affirmation of the play as an autonomous text that neither precludes nor requires success in performance. Nissim Ezekiel belonging to the first model says of him in his interview with Zubin Driver (reference Nissim Ezekiel Remembered eidted by Havovi Anklesoria and published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in 2008, P 64)) ‘I am definitely a poet first, not a dramatist.’ However, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that modern Indian dramatic writing in English is neither rich in quantity nor of very high quality. It is just a few enterprising Indians who have essayed drama in English over the last hundred years and they are seldom fit for stage production, In 1871 was published ‘Is This Called Civilization,’ a dramatic attempt by Madhusudan Dutt, a Bengali poet who introduced the blank verse to Bengali poetry. Chitra, The Post Office, Sacrifice, Mukta Dhara, Red Oleanders - these are, among others, plays by Rabindranath Tagore, originally written in Bengali – are now found available to non-Bengali people in English renderings. Sri Aurobindo wrote in English Perseus the Deliverer, based on a Greek myth, and the recently published Vasavadutta, based on an Indian romance. Perseus: The Deliverer, Hellenic though it is in its main inspiration, is Aurobindonian in its significant undertones, whereas Vasavadutta is suffused with poetry and romance, recalling the spirit and flavour of the distinctive dramatic type exemplified in numerous ways by Bhasa, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti.
In the Greek myth Andromeda is but a passive figure and a patient sufferer; but Perseus is a miracle-worker who saves her in the nick of time from the jaw of the dreaded sea-monster. In Sri Aurobindo’s Perseus, Andromeda gets transformed into a heroic woman fighting evil and braving the consequences of the fights she has fought; she herself spearheads the evolutionary urge to reach up to the higher realms of consciousness. Her decisive action born of pity flings her into conflict with the forces of reaction and a fierce conflict with Polydaon, the Priest of Poseidon and Poseidon himself. But Andrmeda’s courage brings Perseus to her side and prevails upon Pallas Athene to be committed to the evolutionary advance. Pity and power represented by Andromeda and Perseus are thus united to beat back revenge and ruthlessness. And the way is made clear for a decisive step forward in the adventure of evolution.
In Vasavadutta, the hero Vuthsa Udayani is presented as a passive figure. He lets things happen to him as they do to others. Mahasegu has Udayan imprisoned in the jail where his daughter Vasavadutta is herself the jailor. But Vasadutta becomes prisoner. The moves and counter-moves of Mahasegu and Yougundharayan, Udayan’s minister, are but the feeble background used as a means to foreground Vasavadutta’s flaming love for Udayan. Among the minor characters, Ungarica, Vasavadutta’s mother, and Munjoolica, the captive princess of Sourashtra are delineated with subtlety and understanding, both Perseus, the Deliverer and Vasavadutta have established Sri Aurobindo as a competent dramatist and an accomplished craftsman in verse.
Apart from Sri Aurobindo, a good many Indian writers writing in English felt themselves urged along to practice dramatic writing, thanks to the potent spell of Shakespeare. Many Indo-Anglian poets have switched over to writing playettes or even full-length plays. Harindranath Chattopadhyay, always noted for his fecundity as a writer, has to his credit a succession of plays. He will be remembered for his historical play on Gautama Buddha. Dilip Kumar Roy, who translated into English his father Dwijendranath’s famous play Mebar Patan published in 1950, himself wrote a verse play entitled “ Chaitanya. There are other minor Indo-Anglian writers who tried their hands at writing plays... The constraint on space does not permit but just mention of them and their work.
It is an acknowledged fact that the paucity of good actable English plays written by Indians is mainly attributed to the fact that the natural medium of conversation excepting with the super-sophisticated who live in the cities and larger towns and who are attached to universities particularly as professors, is the mother tongue rather than English. Thus many plays written in English cannot be performed for the general audiences and their performances are mostly limited to the super-sophisticated. In the situation antagonistic to the staging of Indian English drama, one writer who has emerged successful is T.P. Kailasam whose English plays are, unlike his Kannada plays, inspired by Puranic themes. His English plays have achieved popularity among the audiences particularly because he brilliantly renders them in the intellectual idiom of our own day. His plays, Burden and Fulfilment were published in 1933 and turned out to be poignant dramatic pieces. Kailasam handles in his play Burden the theme dramatized by Bhasa in his Statue Play and imbues it with a power and beauty of its own. On returning from the place of his grandfather to Ayodhya, Bharata confronts the terrible truth that his father Dasharatha is dead. Like Oedipus, Bharata learns the truth last, Shatrughana’s eyes having been opened a bit earlier. In this play Kailasham has shown how prose can be made a fit vehicle for the expression of tragic emotion. Fulfilment is a longer and a more lacerating play; it bites, scalds and stabs. Ekalavya, Drona’s pupil dexterous in archery, is about to join Kauravas on the eve of the Kurukshetra war. Krishna tries to dissuade Ekalavya from joining Kaurava in the Kurukshetra war and speechifies on good and evil, courage and cowardice, Driven mad by his inability to lure Ekalavya from his decision, he stabs him on the sly. To cover up his wrong, Krishna assures the dying Ekalavya that his mother won’t grieve over his death.
Another successful venture of Kailashan is Karna: The Brahmin’s Curse. This play, though written much earlier, was published in 1946. The author himself speaks of the play as ‘an impression of Sophocles in five acts. There is a suspicion of the Oedipus glow in Karna in the play. Destiny weaves its coil around him ruthlessly and wherever Krishna goes, he finds himself enmeshed , checkmated at every turn he takes, thwarted and defeated again and again; but thwarted and defeated, he is purified and glorified in the process. Written in a mixture of prose and verse, the language, though often quaint and knotted, rises repeatedly to poetic heights. .
V.V. Srinivas Iyenger , another important playwright concerns himself with the incongruous, ludicrous and droll elements in the lives of the sophisticated in his social comedies, Among his plays, ‘The Family Cage’ deserves a mention here. In this play he treats the plight of a widowed sister in a joint family. Some of his other plays are ‘Apes in the Parlour’, a play that skims the surface of sophisticated life, and ‘Flags of the Heart’, a sentimental dramatic piece with a sentimental conclusion.
I could not evade touching upon two plays of Bharati Sarabhai, the most distinguished of women dramatists, before switching over to dealing with one or two plays of Nissim Ezekiel’s. Bharati Sarabhai’s first play, The Well of the People, more a poetic pageant than a play, is based upon the story of a Brahmin widow, The story is this: A Brahmin widow, unable to fulfill her ambition of going over to Haridwar or Kashi, desires to build with her savings a well for the Harijans in her dear old village. But alas! the pitcher is broken at the threshold of the well before it is built; she falls forward on the ground. Bharati Sarabhai embellishes this bare story with her poetic outpouring in the play. Her second play, Two Women deals with the tension at the heart of Hindustan, the opposing pulls of tradition and the paralysis that turns the impulse to move forward so futile.
Nissim Ezekiel is said to have subscribed to the view that is still prevalent that he wrote plays sporadically. Vrindi Nabar in her article, Domesticity and Drama:Nissim Ezekiel’s Marriage Poem and Don’t Call it Suicide, reference ‘Nisssm Ezekiel Remembered’ quotes Nissima Ezekiel, on page 550 as saying in an interview published in ‘Literature Alive’ Volume !, No. 3, December 1987, ‘I have not yet written plays substantially enough to be considered in terms of bad, good, better, best and worst…Nalini and Marriage Poems I consider worth staging…’ In his conversation with Zubin Driver reference Nissim Ezekiel Remembered (P. 63) he says that his only doubt about his plays ‘is the general level of the whole thing. A great play establishes itself in people’s mind.’ He stresses the danger of confusing a play with other works by the same author and distinguishes between a poem and a play by saying that when writing a poem you should look for outlets, whereas while writing a play you are sure to face some inherent difficulty. If a play written and printed and even reprinted is not staged, it is of no value, because ‘it has not been tested as drama’. While admitting to being influenced by Pound, Eliot, Auden and so on in writing poetry, he tells his interviewer he does not owe his writing plays to anybody. “I think,” he says, ‘it has something to do with the long gaps between nothing and writing.’
Nissim Ezekiel adhered to the techniques of conventional theatre in writing plays, its theme, disharmony of marriage, presented in fairly uncomplicated manner. In this play our perception of marriage is whetted. Stage-direction is sometimes elaborate, sometimes precise to cope with a series of shifting scenarios.
The play, Marriage Poem structuarally carries about it all the nuances of a dream-sequence, in as much as, it does not fit into the sequential pattern of events. The play also depicts a crucial aspect of marriage with the husband, Naresh, dallying with the affections of another woman, Leela who showers upon him love and sympathy he desperately needs, and which his wife, Mala, fails to proffer to him.
I reproduce the dialogue between Naresh and Leela, quoted by Vrinda Nahar in her article. When the train carrying Leela arrives at the station and disgorges her to be embraced by Naresh waiting to receive her, the dialogue reveals how the absence of love in Naresh-and-Mala’s conjugal life has estranged them.
Leela: (Ruffling his hair) O, my poor boy.
Naresh: (Disengaging) Don’t pity me..
Leela: I ran half the way from the station. My train stopped between stations over and over again.
Naresh: O, they do that, but they make up time somehow.
Leela: Mine didn’t. It was ten minutes late.
Naresh: Ten minutes. That’s not very long.
Leela: I don’t mind. (They embrace again.)
Naresh: Happy?
Leela: Happy. (They break up. She sits down. He remains standing.)
Naresh: You don’t mind the secrecy, the lies, the danger of scandal?
Leela: I don’t mind.
Naresh: You don’t mind that we can meet only once a week?
Leela: I don’t mind. (He goes down on his knees and puts his head on her lap.)
In his next play, ‘Don’t Call It Suicide’, Nissim Ezekiel treats of the gloomy aspect of marriage and presents a dismal and unredeemed view of marriage. Now let us hear what Ezekiel himself says apropos this play in his interview with Zubin Driver, ‘I think,’ he says, ‘there is any play of mine that could influence anybody. Don’t Call It Suicide did have a strong sociological message – the play was based on a true incident that I had heard of in Pune.’ The play aims to explore the marital relationships set within the web of a single large family. Structurally this play has two acts, each act subdivided into scenes.
As distinct from his earlier play Marriage Poem, Don’t Call It Suicide projects the make-believe security of a superficially placid, ‘working’ marriage. Deep below the extraneous surface of placidity is revealed in vivid details the lack of joy. Mr and Mrs Nanda have simply stridden into the trap of conventional and stereotypical dependence on each other and their relationship is shown as one of mutual understanding.
‘A middle-class respectability’ is a single phrase poignant enough to sum up the ambience of the world inhabited by the Nandas. The skeleton in the cupboard of their eldest son who had committed suicide some years before poses a threat to their respectability. The paranoia about even admitting that their eldest son could have committed suicide expresses itself in a sentnece ‘Don’t call it suicide’ uttered by Mrs Nanda again and again. This paranoia contributes to a tiff between Mr and Mrs Nanda and leads Mrs Nanda to suspect Mr Sathe, her husband’s visitor of reminding her husband of the event that she is trying to make him forget.
From dramatical point of view Don’t Call It Suicide does not break a new ground, as Nissim Ezekiel himself has admitted in his interview with Zubin Driver. But it, as does his Marriage Poem, it takes the audience down to the depth of the social institution called marriage. However, by writing these two plays, Nissim Ezekiel established himself as a playwright in addition to being a poet.