Home | Hindi | Kabir | Poetry | Workshop | BoloKids | Writers | Contribute | Search | Contact                                                 Shop Online

Hinduism 
The Mahabharata as Theatre

That the epic of Vyasa is high drama has never been questioned, except by German savants like Oldenberg who threw up his hands in despair at "the most monstrous chaos!" But whether it makes for good theatre remained an open question. The dramatizations of Dwijendralal Roy, Kshirodeprased Bidyabinode, Nabin Chandra Sen, et al, were more in the "jatra" (folk-theatre) mould than what we would like to describe as proper plays. Even today, the epic provides some of the most popular productions of the folk-theatre repertory, with quite remarkable and controversial interpretation inspired by the novels of Dipak Chandra in Bengali, Ram Kumar Bhramar and Narendra Kohli in Hindi, Vasudevan Nair in Malayalam, Shivaji Sawant in Marathi and so on.

What remains possibly the most important modern creation of the Mahabharata as theatre is Buddhadeva Bose's trio: Anamni Angana, Pratham Partha and Kalsandhya. Unfortunately, all three have remained confined to the esoteric area of the closet-drama (shruti-natak), depriving the audience thereby of the cut-and-thrust of antagonistic protagonists and the delicate probing of the human psyche that makes these plays such engrossing reading.

In recent times it is another aspect of folk-culture that has invaded the drawing-rooms: the tradition of the kathak, the tellers-of-tales, whose origins hark back to Sauti the suta who narrated the Mahabharata to the sages in the Naimisha forest. These are Punaram Nishad, Fida Bai and, the most famous of all, Teejan Bai through their "Pandavani".

The Sanskritisation, if one may so term it, of this kathak form has taken a fascinating turn in Calcutta in the hands of Shaoli Mitra. Using this folk-form, she has modified it with superb skill to put on the Bengali stage virtually a one-woman show of the kernel of the Mahabharata in "Katha Amrita Saman" (Words-like-nectar). She had begun her daring venture in the early eighties with the portrayal of the existential angst of Draupadi, five-husbanded yet husband-less in Nathabati Anathabat. In 1990 she ventured further, to portray on stage the major female characters of the epic: Satyavati, Kunti, Gandhari and Draupadi. Another remarkable portrayal has been that of Savitri and Draupadi through a combination of dance-and-recitation by Mallika Sarabhai in her production, "Shakti". I deliberately leave out of the ambit of this discussion Peter Brook's neither-fish-nor-fowl concoction. It is, indeed, a tribute to the clear-sightedness of Mallika Sarabhai that out of that confusion she has so successfully sieved out the scintillating gem that is Draupadi as felt in the heart of another woman of culture and power.

Besides the singular performances of Shaoli Mitra and Mallika Sarabhai, Calcutta has seen in early 1990 the staging of what is possibly the most fierce and traumatic representation of the horror of the Kurukshetra holocaust: Dharmavir Bharati's Andhaa Yuga. If in Kalsandhya Buddhadev Bose depicts the decadence of the Yadavas after the great war—as if, indeed, it had never taken place—signalling the end of an epoch, then in Andhaa Yuga Dharmavir Bharati mercilessly lashes into excruciating agony the violent revulsion, the white-hot hatred, the terrifying madness and the deadening physical and mental darkness that is the fall-out of the final encounter between Ashvatthama and the Pandavas. Where Bose makes the epic contemporary in terms of an expose of a disintegrating polity, bereft of values, living and feeding on offal, Bharati makes the flesh crawl with all-too-fresh memories of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and napalmed Vietnam. There are no heroes here. The same putrefying pus that oozes filthily from the sores covering cursed Ashvatthama bursts out from the wound made by the arrow in Krishna's foot. Yuyutsu, who crossed over from the Kaurava to the Pandava camp, commits suicide on finding himself ostracized by all in Hastinapura, even by his parents who look on him as the slayer of his blood-brothers. Wine, women and debauchery drive the Yadavas into the gaping maw of death as Krishna first watches, than joins in the massacre of kith and kin. We are not even left with the solace of the epic, that the burden of Mother Earth has been lifted. Darkness envelops all as the era comes to an end, with no hints of a new dawn of hope, of re-birth. We are left on a darkling plain, caught in limbo, between a world that is dead and another not yet born, not even heralded!

One dearly wishes that these two plays were staged in succession. But Kalsandhya has never even been play-read in a major performance. Possibly, we in Bengal find the contents somewhat too close for comfort, the warning signals it sets off being too unsavory in a metropolis with a population of over 80,000 drug-addicts.

– Continued

Page : 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Top | Hinduism