And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  My burning desire to see Grotowski’s work remained unfulfilled and we were not even permitted anywhere near what used to be the performance space. When he did perform, apparently even witnessing a rehearsal was not possible; he now no longer had audiences and the place was unused except for workshop sessions by some of his ex- students, but we were barred even from attending these. The previous week’s experience in the forest and now this ‘secret ceremony’ attitude was making absolutely no sense, and the condescending attitude of the instructors didn’t help. Gaur ‘Khepa’ moodily informed me he had wanted to leave almost as soon as he arrived but in an ominous twist had his passport taken away, and he was being practically compelled to stay on. I was baffled and disturbed by the goings-on, but he detested the whole affair and resolutely refused to take part in any of the exercises. Laughing continuously through the phlegm in his chest and calling it all ‘mano chodan’ (mind fucking) he would emit clouds of smoke, sadly only of tobacco, from his chillum, hoist his ektara and go off into orbit for hours. I had no such outlet. We were not permitted even to read.

  The second session in the forest was the same old thing with some additional stuff, which I will respect the oath I took and not talk about, except to say that Grotowski took part occasionally and some of it was pretty scary and it still made no sense whatsoever. I had an eerie sensation of being initiated into some sort of a cult and knew this was not what I had come here for. The resolutely unquestioning way all were going about what was asked of them unnerved me. I decided that since I couldn’t read and was not participating any more, to write about this whole experience which I started to do, only to discover to my disbelief all those pages torn out of my diary a few days later. Deciding I had had quite enough of this concentration camp with Big Brother watching all the time, I booked myself a ticket back to Bombay via Warsaw and quit the workshop after twenty days.

  The feeling that I was losing my bearings would start turning more acute after another week in that forest, that was for sure. Waiting at Warsaw airport for my flight back, I saw a Sikh gentleman for the first time in Poland and I felt grounded again and halfway home already. I had had no telephonic contact with Ratna all this time and I wasn’t supposed to return for another month, so all were duly astonished when I reappeared, sans my luggage which Lot Airlines had misplaced and which finally got to me a month later. This whole misadventure didn’t have too many after-effects except for a foot infection and the dawning of the realization that no one at all could in fact help, and whatever I wanted to learn I’d have to do on my own.

  For quite a while I kept grappling with what the scenario might have been had I stayed on; I even kicked myself a couple of times. Had I chickened out? Was I not ready for Grotowski? Did I need to evolve much more before I could comprehend what he was doing? The fact that Grotowski after he passed away sometime later left no lasting legacy except a bunch of very well-equipped but pathetically ill-adjusted actors banished from my mind any doubt I may have had about having missed an opportunity to grow. My own world was where I belonged and it had begun to seem like a mirage. This whole misadventure had turned out a foolish waste of hard-earned money and, more important, time. Whatever it was they were trying to impart to us in that forest, I knew it was of absolutely no use to me. After achieving the primal state, what? Does one then try to cohabit with bears in the jungle? And I was not looking for a guru who would provide answers if you waited long enough. I didn’t need any answers, I needed to hone my craft. And if physical prowess was what this was about then I had, even before coming to Poland, waded in enough streams and climbed enough trees and wandered in enough forests to be able to find anything new and elevating in all that.

  I had gone there looking to gain some insight into my work which I was, by and large, happy in and which I intended to continue doing. Here I felt I was losing my wits and it was not a comforting thought; no way did I want to lose touch with my reality, there was too much there that I loved. The ‘primal state’ and ‘conditioned responses’ part had made sense, though, and I was dimly aware that if I could shed the second and gain the first or get somewhere close, that could be of enormous help in my acting, but this seemed to be more than just that. This had the smell of proselytization and prophet-building. The unquestioning submission asked of us I just did not take to, nor the air of mystery created around everything. I have to say I had visions of another Jonestown. Setting himself up as a guru and withholding information from disciples is all that Grotowski seemed to have assimilated from the Indian guru-shishya tradition, with the difference that in return for this loyalty he actually gave back nothing the way a guru does and should, he seemed only to be taking; putting us into situations, observing us, probably reaching some conclusions which none of us at least were privy to. I felt like a guinea pig must feel in an experiment. (This feeling came upon me again with full force when playing Rosencrantz in Grotowski’s most celebrated disciple Peter Brook’s Hamlet in Paris in the year 2001. Peter was equally intent on mythologizing himself and had not only never bothered to learn how to pronounce the word ‘Mahabharata’, he turned out to be easily the vainest, most self-absorbed person I have ever met. Never once coming anywhere near to divulging any insight into theatre work or the meaning of the play, he stayed completely oblivious to all of us except the leading actor. )

  My attempts in Poland to delve into what it was that those who seemed adjusted found stimulating had elicited only vague responses like ‘it’s so liberating’, ‘I’m just experiencing the energy’, ‘it’s enough just to know he is around’, ‘my life has expanded’ and so on. I wondered then how many of them could actually relate any of it to their work, and wonder now how many of them came away with anything tangible. I do know, however, that two of them from India who thus far had been pretty active in the theatre never ever attempted another play again, nor anything else as far as I know; one of them continues to do whatever it is he does, in a forest near Calcutta, and Gaur passed away shortly after. So bizarre was this whole experience that I was almost grateful to start shooting a Hindi commercial potboiler again—the one I hadn’t been able to pull out of before leaving—and wallowed in the perks that go with a job of that kind, including first-class travel to Dubai, five-star comfort there and the heavenly Helen sitting on my lap (in a scene, of course!)

  The news of Richard Attenborough’s dream project—to film Gandhiji’s life—had been circulating in India since I was a child in school. I had even read a news item about his having attended a film festival in India to announce this intention. The person slated to play the part then was Sir Alec Guinness but at that time it was just an announcement. Over the intervening years many other respected thespian names were floated: Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasence, Anthony Hopkins, Brian Blessed, John Hurt. And just around the time that Aakrosh came out, the news broke that an Indian actor would be chosen to play the part and Sir Richard was to visit Bombay shortly to look for such an actor. My antenna vibrated madly, I thought I was in with a pretty good chance. When I had first learnt of the prospective film (1964 I think it was) I didn’t give a thought to the possibility of playing the role—hell, I was fourteen, I wanted to play Zorro not Gandhi; but now closing in on thirty, I thought the prospect was worth pursuing. I thought I could age convincingly, I had done it several times onstage, but getting the eponymous role in a huge Hollywood biopic—it all seemed too unreal to actually happen but reason told me it wasn’t impossible at all. Which European actor would be able to get Gandhi’s body language, I thought vainly; and there weren’t too many other accomplished actors in India either who could manage the physical resemblance. Nature had given me a slight physique and a funny face for this reason alone! If it were to be an Indian actor, it had to be me.

  Not suspecting that the dice was loaded, I got an appointment to meet Sir Richard, friendliness itself. He had just seen Aakrosh, waxed eloquent about my work and kept addressing me as ‘maestro’. I told him I had admired his acting in a couple of
little-known films, The Angry Silence and Guns at Batasi. He seemed to have forgotten them and was indifferent, but we hit it off rather well and he said we should meet again. Every second actor in Bombay was making the rounds of the Taj Hotel where he was staying, in the hope of a meeting, but I secured another one at which he asked me if I would like to travel to London for a screen test. I was growing a beard for a forthcoming movie but hastily got rid of it, leaving the moustache, got into one of the new suits I had by now acquired and embarked for Vilayat for the first time, travelling executive class along with Smita Patil, Bhakti Barve and Rohini Hattangady, all contenders for the part of Kasturba Gandhi. Two Rolls-Royces with the personalized registration numbers RA 1 and RA 2 awaited us and we rode in splendour to Oxford Street where we were lodged in rooms that had TV. Having no clue of the bill I would later be hit with, I telephoned Ratna and she told me that news had already appeared in the Indian papers that I had been cast. My spirits soaring like the clouds on that gorgeous summer day, I swaggered down Oxford Street, soaking London in. I was in England at last and again I realized I was missing Baba.

  Next morning at Shepperton Studios, the first sight that greeted me in the corridor was the back of Ben Kingsley’s head and my heart sank. He turned around as we were introduced and it went further down somewhere near my ankles. The man already looked more like Gandhi than I ever could. I had been too smug in my belief that there couldn’t be an English actor who could manage the resemblance but here he was right in front of my eyes. The other ‘contender’, also present, with calf- muscles like a tennis player, was John Hurt. I later deduced that Ben had in fact already been cast, as had Rohini, and this whole business of tom-tomming all of us being tested and sneaking the news to the press in India that I had been chosen was a masquerade conducted to pre-empt objections that inevitably would have arisen if a white actor were announced straight away. And of course it had to be a white actor—the Oscar campaign had probably begun even before the shoot started.

  In fact almost immediately on returning, I saw a news heading, ‘Indian Actor to Play Gandhi’, but the picture beneath it was of Mr Kingsley. I was crushed but not entirely taken by surprise. I had gone to London fully expecting to have to shave my head for the test but no such thing had happened. I was ‘tested’ with Rohini in a scene as the young Gandhi; then to my bewilderment as Nehru in another one with Kingsley as Gandhi; and I could not run away from the fact that he was better equipped to play the part. In any case I wasn’t given a chance to display my wares. It’s a pungent irony that in my entire career this is the one part I went after and it eluded me. I don’t know if I was so eager to play the part itself or eager for the worldwide exposure it would involve. I did think though, when I saw it, that Ben was quite wonderful, he got everything right except Gandhiji’s ear-to-ear smile. I was not at that time skilled enough to have pulled it off the way he did, though. My curiosity to know if I could, however, was finally stilled many years later when I played Gandhi on the stage in a hugely successful production; and merely repeated that performance in a film with so much prosthetic on my face it could have made a Mongolian actor resemble Gandhi if his head were shaved and he wore granny glasses.

  Search for a voice

  Dubeyji, meanwhile, had written another play, Apratyashita (Unexpected), which he wanted to do with Amrish Puri and a few others, myself included. Much as I disliked this perverse piece about an unorthodox relationship I was keen once again to participate in what I understood as theatre and went into it with whatever zest I could summon. If Grotowski had shed no other light, at least he had made me see that I should make do with what was available instead of chasing the end of the rainbow. It was while doing this play that the irony of the actor’s job being completely dependent on other factors became clear to me. Why the very same person could be brilliant in one job and atrocious in another no longer remained a mystery; an actor can only be as good as the work he is in. The categorization of actors into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ began to seem a bit of an injustice, even though there are undeniably some who should not be in the profession at all, and even to call those ones ‘bad’ would be a compliment.

  An actor’s output hinges totally on being cast right, on how the scene is written, what the character is asked to do, how he is guided to do it, often even on how he is lit. There is no way an actor can salvage a faulty scene, and this play had them in abundance. It was another ghastly production, and I again performed uncomprehendingly. I seriously began to wonder if Dubey in the theatre was all he was cracked up to be. As a student, I had been hugely impressed with the precision and intensity of his theatre work and the performances by Sulabha and Arvind Deshpande in the luminous film he had made of Tendulkar’s Shantata! Court Chaalu Aahe, but working with him thus far had given me no real charge. I was offended by his aversion to what I considered my way of working, and he was determined to make me see that truthful impulses were not all that was required to make an action stage-worthy. It took me a while to come around to his view. He however continued to claim he saw no validity in mine and greatly enjoyed knocking it. He did however continue to cast me, so I guess I was doing something right.

  Dubey was accustomed to plotting out the characters’ moves in advance, and after the actors were instructed it was left to them to inject meaning into what he had devised, very much like Alkazi, whose work and personality Dubey had a marked aversion to, though both could scream hysterically at actors equally well. I was at the stage where I felt that exploring possibilities before deciding on a move or an intonation was the way I liked to work, but I could see that Dubey’s technique just like Alkazi’s, despite both being terrible hams as actors themselves, had by now, because of all their years of constructing stage actions, gotten distilled into an infallible instinct for knowing what looked right onstage and what didn’t. Dubey, like Alkazi, had an inbuilt shit-detector and no patience at all with ‘fancy concepts like exploring’. Unlike Alkazi however he was concerned not with the aesthetics but the guts of a scene. All that notwithstanding, my experiences of working with Dubey thus far, and later also—including in Girish Karnad’s Bali, Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Pratibimb and Dharamveer Bharti’s Andha Yug—were dissatisfying. I presume that had I been at the same stage of evolution when I worked with Alkazi I may have found him equally wanting.

  As the years went by I grew further and further away from Alkazi’s kind of theatre, and it was when working with Dubey on his beloved Shaw (Village Wooing, Don Juan in Hell and Dear Liar) that I finally managed to get on to his bandwidth and discovered that his lifelong obsession with perfect diction and clarity of speech was no idle whim, it was as important as the ‘true feelings’ I had always been after.

  Dubey’s contention was that in Shaw’s prose, as in the best poetry, the music of the word-sounds contains all the feelings; the words do not need any embellishment, only purity of pronunciation. The same however is not true of Shakespeare, whose worldview or absence of it Dubey also had an issue with and thus did not hold the bard in as high esteem as he did Mr Shaw. I was perplexed at someone scoffing at Shakespeare, but what Dubey said sounded valid.

  In Shakespeare the incisive psychological studies of characters at war with themselves are expressed in the most sublime poetry but the plots are hardly worth writing home about; they are in fact utterly predictable. Most of them are borrowed from older works or myth, and he takes major liberties with history. The irresistible P. G. Wodehouse claims (only in jest?) ‘the old bird’s spelling was not quite up to par, neither was his grammar’. I had in any case never found any of his ‘comedies’ funny, but listening to Dubey it began to dawn on me that the action of even the ‘tragic’ or ‘historical’ plays seems to be pushing not towards an accurate representation of, or a significant statement about a society, a people or an era or even an individual, but towards a resolution which more often than not strains credibility, but attempts to be as dramatically entertaining as possible. That is perhaps why the Hindi filmwalas have
helped themselves to such humongous doses of Shakespeare—there is no cliché in Hindi cinema that is not borrowed from the man, and I often wonder what popular Hindi cinema would have been like without Shakespeare’s source material. Julius Caesar was the first of his plays I’d read and I had many ideas for a production of it. It was, first of all, not a tour de force for a single actor as most of Shakespeare’s great plays are, and unlike any of his other works (the oft-borrowed Romeo and Juliet being an exception) seemed to represent the state of affairs in India and elsewhere pretty accurately as well, so I didn’t consider adapting or Indianizing it in order to present it. Humbled at the thought of doing it myself, I tried without success to persuade Dubeyji. Ultimately, many years later, around 1985, I plunged into it myself.

  After six months of yelling at the actors, or the light designer or the backstage crew, on opening night my voice disappeared along with my hopes that this production would receive great acclaim. It was an unexpected lesson on how we in India love creating gods and cannot tolerate anything we consider a desecration of them. That so many in the audience were offended by the changes in the script taught me that Mr WS is more revered in India than in his own country, and it really is hard not to smell a cultural conspiracy here, still working after all these decades. Much as I loved the play ever since I’d studied it in Class 9 in Sem, I’d always felt there was something wrong with it. The two halves seem written by two different people. While the initial section is crisp, racy and engrossing, the post-oratory part feels like another play altogether; it refuses even to allude to Caesar’s assassins, all of whom except Brutus and Cassius vanish from the scene without explanation and are replaced by another set of characters who you do not know and care nothing about. Convinced that the conspirators should be shown getting their comeuppance, I altered major portions of the second half of the play including Brutus’s suicide. We were greeted with incomprehension or jeering, which I suspect would have happened even if I had not changed a word of the text. The audiences, such as they were, had come either to be entertained or to see something they thought they knew, and were well and truly baffled. While the real flaw of the production lay mostly in the actors’ diction, and I am not defending it for a moment, I was stupefied by the accusations of ‘blasphemy’, no less, that were hurled at us by teachers of various schools whose students we had hoped to tap as potential audience. They all promised to forbid their students from ever seeing our production. And because I had eliminated all the soliloquies and made them part of conversations, to my disbelief, I was confronted by an irate teacher who accused me of ‘confusing the students in their understanding of reference to context’.