Three Plays

by Gurcharan Das

  GURCHARAN DAS

  Three Plays

  LARINS SAHIB

  MIRA

  9 JAKHOO HILL

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Larins Sahib

  Mira

  9 Jakhoo Hill

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Three Plays

  Gurcharan Das is a well-known novelist, playwright and public intellectual. He is a columnist for the Times of India, and other papers. He is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good, India Unbound, A Fine Family and The Elephant Paradigm.

  Praise for the Plays

  ‘Remarkable in the way it combines Indian legend with the sophistication of Western total theatre … Mira has something of the quality of a dream ritual. [She] is a modern woman being broken on the wheels of convention … It has all the grace of a lovely voice speaking of eternals in a language just delicately opaque’

  —Clive Barnes, New York Times

  ‘One can see why Larins Sahib won the Sultan Padamsee Prize … beautifully structured, with simplicity, carving out the development of one man’s character. The dialogue is lucid and dramatic … like a delicate instrument in a surgeon’s hand. We feel the ineffable thrill of tragedy’

  —Enact

  ‘During the autumn of discontent of a once-wealthy clan [9 Jakhoo Hill] broods over better days … on the hold that mothers have over their sons, a family coming down in the world … remnants of the Raj, disillusionment with politics. Sixties? The script is here and now’

  —India Today

  ‘But by all that is noble and true [Mira] is an artistic achievement of immense merit and supreme significance to the re-blossoming of the theatre in India … A rare, beautiful experience, watching and listening to Mira; one came out of the theatre cleaner, more joyous, and several centimetres taller’

  —Times of India

  ‘This prize-winning play [Larins Sahib] has solid dramatic substance’

  —Nissim Ezekiel, Times of India

  For Meera Barkat Ram

  Introduction

  I wrote three plays in my twenties. Each one is set in India at a different time and employs a distinct genre. Larins Sahib, a historical play, is set in the confused period after the death of Ranjit Singh when the British first arrived in the Punjab in the 1840s. Through a human drama of hubris that eventually brings about the hero’s downfall, this play describes the early relationships of the English with Indians. Mira, first produced as a rock musical in New York, explores what it means to become a saint through the story of Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajput princess-poet. 9 Jakhoo Hill, the third play in this volume, is a realistic family drama, set in the sad autumn of 1962 in Simla when the Chinese invaded India. It is about the changing social order with the rise of a new middle class and hence even more relevant to the India of the early twenty-first century.

  Writing a play takes a certain amount of wild audacity which I lack today. In my twenties, though, I had the madness of youth when everything was possible. When I sat down to write Larins Sahib at twenty-two, I thought to myself that Shakespeare too must have sat down on one such day to write Hamlet. Now a person who has his wits about him does not compare himself to Shakespeare, even in his dreams, but this is precisely the kind of reckless lunacy you need to get started on an impossible project.

  I have since realized that writing a play is much more difficult than any other form of writing. Theatre audiences are critical. One false note and you are done for. Readers of books, I think, are far more sympathetic. To write for the theatre you have to know the theatre. Ideally, you should have been an actor or a director, at least for a while, or hang around the theatre a lot. To publish a book you don’t have to know about publishing and printing in the same way. For a person of the theatre, performance is the thing. On the stage it is always here and now. A novel, on the other hand, is about what happened, and the writer’s reassuring voice is always there, narrating what happened. A play is not on paper. It is there to share with actors, directors, set designers, electricians and music makers.

  It is the business of theatre to entertain people. Nothing needs less justification than successful entertainment. People pay hard-earned money to buy a ticket, and they must be given pleasure. Aristotle demanded that even tragedy should first entertain. The problem for a writer is that theatre is so utterly dependent upon stage production and the intervention of the actor. My plays keep getting performed sporadically and I sometimes go and see a production. Invariably, I get the feeling that it is someone else’s play. Once written, I suppose it is. It belongs to those performing it or watching it. I stay away from the stage because I am not a ‘theatre person’. I am uncomfortable with theatre people and actors, some of whom are on stage all the time.

  After these three plays, I wrote a novel, A Fine Family, and I learned a great deal about the difference between the two genres. A novel is generally written in the past tense. It is the past reported in the present. In drama, it is always now. This gives theatre an energy and vitality, which the novelist longs for in his work. A play is what happens. A novel is what one person tells us about what happened. In the end, I think there are probably more similarities than differences between novels and plays because both interpret life. Life as it appears to us in our daily experience is an unintelligible chaos of happenings. As it is occurring, life is senseless. Both novelists and playwrights pick out significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant. Time is an important ally in this. Henri Bergson once said that the great advantage of time is that it prevents everything from happening at once.

  If I had to go back and write these plays all over again, I would have insisted on working with a group of actors as soon as I had the first draft of the play. I would have given lots of room to actors to improvise and I would have trained myself to be receptive to what was working on the stage and what was not. I would have learned ‘to listen’ and ‘to see’ what an audience does and a writer does not. I would have learned to be humble and learn from the actors and their improvisational exercises. I realize it is a different kind of work for a writer to write in this manner when he is so used to working alone, but it cannot be helped. The test of a play is how it works on the stage and not how it reads.

  But I get ahead of myself. Let me go back to the beginning. I shall first describe how I learned to write, why I became a writer in English, what sort of language English is evolving into in India, and why it is important to use that language in the theatre in order to connect with Indian audiences. Then I shall come back to the three plays.

  Growing Up to Write

  I grew up in a middle-class Indian family that could afford to give me an education. This enabled me to write and speak in English and exposed me to Western liberal ideas. And so, I found myself in a situation of privilege on the Indian subcontinent. As I grew older I felt it a duty to capture my experiences and articulate them as honestly as I could. My mother taught me that one’s life is earned, earned against formidable odds, and one must somehow try to make some sort of sense out of it. Writing, I have discovered, is one way to do it.

  I was the eldest son of an engineer who worked for the government in the Punjab. Our family budget was always tight and after paying for school fees and milk, there was little left to run the house. My mother told us stories from the Mahabharata and encouraged in us the virtues of thrift, honesty, and responsibility. We lived in the innocence of the Nehru age when we still had strong ideals. We believed in socialism, democracy and the United Nations. We were filled with the excitement of building a nation. Even thoug
h the dream soured, Nehru’s idealism left a permanent mark on us.

  I went to America as a schoolboy for a few years in the 1950s. In my high school I was surprised that we had to attend a class called ‘shop’, which was filled with lathes, tools, and machines, and we learned to work with our hands. We learned to repair a window, make a table or unclog a sink. At the end of the year, we had lost our fear of technology. We had also understood Bronowski’s dictum that the world is understood through the hand, not the mind—‘The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.’ Hence, many Americans become ‘tinkerers’. This is a powerful idea for India where we have traditionally had contempt for manual labour. Tinkerers combine knowledge with manual labour, and thus you get innovation. A lack of tinkering may be one of the reasons we have failed to create an industrial revolution in India.

  After completing high school I was lucky to get a scholarship to Harvard University. Because American colleges are liberal, I was allowed to experiment with many subjects, and I had the unbelievable luxury of studying Sanskrit with Daniel Ingalls. I took full advantage of this liberality and took courses in economics, history, literature, and even architecture (because I was fascinated with buildings). Eventually I majored in philosophy and wrote my thesis under the moral and political philosopher John Rawls.

  On the day that I graduated from Harvard I knew I would write. I was expected to go on to do a PhD in philosophy (at Oxford) but I chickened out at the last minute. As I lay on the grass one afternoon that summer, I asked myself if I really wanted to spend the rest of my life living in that rarefied stratosphere of abstract thought. I had also begun to feel that the academic life was stuffy and confining. So, I came back home to India instead and, until I could figure out what I wanted to do with my life, joined a company in Bombay which made Vicks Vaporub (and was later acquired by Procter & Gamble). The chief virtue of my job was that it gave me a chance to travel to the smallest towns and villages of India and I had plenty of free time in the evenings. On one such night in Sri Krishna Lodge in Jalandhar in Punjab, I began to write Larins Sahib.

  Soon I discovered that I liked the rough and tumble of the commercial world, and the academic world grew remote. And so, like the man who came to dinner, I stayed on. But while my business friends played golf on weekends, I wrote. For the next thirty years I lived an active business life, first in Bombay and later in many cities around the world. During those years, I thought of myself as a manager, not a ‘literary person’. I retained my passion for the humanities, however. I read voraciously in history, philosophy, and art, and I became a ‘weekend writer’. Although my multinational company sent me to work in many countries, I always seemed to come back. I found I could live only in India. I learned from Cervantes when we lived in Spain that glory lies in one’s own backyard. The universal, he says, is at odds with the cosmopolitan. The more a man belongs to his own time and space the more he belongs to all times and places. I followed Cervantes’ advice and I returned to India even when my career dictated otherwise.

  ‘The end of all our travels,’ T.S. Eliot reminds us, ‘is to come back to the place where we began and to know it for the first time.’ What attracts me to India is a fine word, dharma, which can mean duty, righteousness or law. We are taught in India not to question the dharma of our fathers. I believe, however, that one should question it and discover it for oneself. Our dharma should come from within us and not be dictated by society. Like Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata, I have come to believe that my dharma is the godlike quality of not wishing to hurt anyone. This is also a method of survival.

  The most important lesson I have learned from the business world is that it is not intelligence but the will which moves the world. Just as the barber’s basin appeared to Don Quixote to be a knight’s helmet, so is the world what it seems and wisdom consists in making it into the image of our will. You have to insist loud and clear and courageously defend your claim with your life. The more you believe in a thing, the more it exists. It is not intelligence but the will that imposes truth and martyrs make a faith, not the other way around.

  All writers, I think, seek continuity between their writing and the life they live. Writing needs commitment to a time and place and it brings release from loneliness, which is the human condition. Hence, writing is a classic strategy for survival. But the act of writing also creates distance between the subject and the object and a writer risks becoming too much of an observer, uninvolved and unconcerned. He also risks becoming self-righteous—a most disagreeable quality—and subjective. Yet he needs to withdraw from his environment to be authentic. A writer must always be aware of this dilemma and find some sort of balance in his life.

  It is common for a writer to stand outside his own culture and be critical—Aristophanes, Euripides, Dante, and Shakespeare were passionately and incurably sceptical. But this does not mean that they were adversarial to the ideals of their culture. In fact, they celebrated their culture. It is ironical that the culture that educates us, the patterns of perception learned in our schools, is unfriendly to the commercial civilization in which we live. Business people tend towards optimism. I am no different and hence my writing lacks the angst that has been the defining quality of modern literature and theatre. According to the modern ethos, an artist should be tormented and die young. He is not expected to create beauty but reveal the sordid truth behind our bourgeois lives. The irony is that modern literature and art are hostile to the bourgeois world although they are financed by uneasy bourgeois money.

  Indian intellectuals carry the additional burden of having to reinterpret their tradition. Our nineteenth-century thinkers tried to do this either as revivalists or as synthesizers or reformers from Rammohan Roy onward. Dayanand Saraswathi, Vivekananda, Tagore, Aurobindo, all of them struggled with this task. Today, however, I do not see enough intellectuals doing it. Hence, right nationalists are able to get away with a confused and false view of our past. Indian writers need to examine our rich, rational traditions and not be swept by the mystical side alone.

  After thirty years, I finally decided to call it quits. I felt that I had gone to work each weekday morning. I had fed and looked after my family. My wife and I had raised two children. Gradually, I had moved up the corporate hierarchy. Then one day I asked myself, what had all this been for? With a feeling of futility I wondered: How long could an adult come to work and peer over the market shares of Pampers, Tide, Oil of Olay, and Vicks? There must be more to life? So, after a long career in six countries, most of it reasonably absorbing, I decided to take early retirement at fifty to become a full-time writer.

  Writing in English

  I am comfortable writing in English. If my business discourse can be in English, why not my literary discourse? For me, not unlike many in the Indian middle class, English did not come as a matter of choice. I inherited it from the British Raj. I was sent to English-speaking schools, and as I grew up I found that my command of English was better than my Hindi or Punjabi. My mother knew all along that English was a passport to my future. With globalization of the economy, English has become more than ever the language of the world, and my mother’s gamble has paid off. In the twenty-first century I do not have to be apologetic about writing in English, as I did in the late 1960s and 1970s when I wrote these plays. Although the criticism of those who questioned my right to write in English has diminished, I still feel that there is a problem with performing in English for the theatre in India.

  I have learned to write as I speak. In my case, this is the language that middle-class Indians learn in English-medium schools throughout India. It seems to have become a national language, for all Indians speak it in pretty much the same way. It is no longer imitative—nostalgic of ‘London fogs’ or ‘Surrey dews’—as it used to be before Independence. It is a nice sounding idiom that is flourishing under the bright Indian sun. It is virile and self-confident despite the efforts of our politicians to make us forget English.

  The English that I speak and writ
e originated with the professional middle class in the nineteenth century under British rule. This class not only produced clerks for the East India Company, but also lawyers, teachers, engineers, doctors, bureaucrats—all the new professions that were required to run a country. Since passing an exam was the only barrier to entering this class, its members came from various castes and backgrounds. By and large, opportunities were open to all, although the upper castes were the first to seize them. Once they learned English, acquired an education, and cleared an exam, rewards and prestige were showered upon them. They became the new elite and they closed ranks. By the time that my father went to college in the 1930s there was a thin but growing middle class, which had gone through the same education system across India, and had attained a general unity of vision. It had a liberal, humanistic outlook, which was tolerant of ambiguities. It shared a community of thought, feeling, and ideas, and this partly built up a modern sense of Indian nationality.

  After Independence, we heard constant complaints against the use of English in India. Some states banned it from primary schools and government offices. Politicians found there were votes in anti-English rhetoric. But English would not be put down, and sometime in the 1990s the carping seemed to stop and quietly English became one of the Indian languages. More and more Indians are becoming comfortable with English, and one of these days India will become the largest English-speaking nation in the world according to experts. Today, we are more accepting of English, I think, because we are more relaxed and confident as a nation. The minds of our young have become decolonized and one of the symptoms of this liberation is the increasing use of ‘Hinglish’.

  The purists disapprove of this uninhibited hybrid of Hindi and English but most of us accept it with a shrug. Mixing English with our mother tongues had been going on for generations. Earlier it had been a language of mobility but this time around Hinglish is both the aspirational language of the lower classes and the fashionable idiom of upper-class drawing rooms. It is the stylish language of Bollywood, FM radio and television. Advertisers, in particular, have been surprised by its resonance. Who knows, maybe a hundred years from now, Hinglish will also produce its Shakespeare.