Three Plays

by Gurcharan Das

  Although Mira was forgotten in Rajasthan, the mercantile middle classes in Gujarat preserved her memory over the centuries, linked to the rise of the weaving communities. It was Mahatma Gandhi who resuscitated her in the twentieth century when he entered India’s freedom movement in 1915. Through his writings, political speeches, and his prayer meetings Mira entered the national consciousness. Gandhi wisely tapped a reservoir of goodwill for bhakti in the Indian psyche and secured for Mira a wide popular base amongst the Indian middle and lower classes and a place in the nationalist political culture. Following his example, Tagore named his daughter after Mira. So did many others. My sister also has the same name—she is the Meera to whom this book is dedicated.

  Mira’s poems are an outpouring of love and faith. No one hearing them can doubt for a moment the intensity and genuineness of her mystical faith. As a Rajput princess, she gave up the security of a palace and a husband, and took to wandering, singing, and dancing—a most courageous and extreme step for any woman to take in any society. The problem for the playwright is how to describe this transformation from a woman into a saint. And how does one begin to explain the immense faith of a devotee? God is ultimately a human endeavour by finite beings to overcome their incompleteness. Thus, a longing for completeness is the starting point of this lovesick, mystical way. And how does one describe the relation between the seeker and the transcendent something else in relation to which the world is flattened? Mira’s poems suggest that the heart feels him to be present when it feels his absence most keenly.

  To solve these problems I imagined Mira as a high-spirited young bride, who comes and shatters the rigid and formal atmosphere of the court in sixteenth-century Mewar, a state much burdened by a sense of its historical destiny. I focused on the evolving relationship between husband and wife. Initially, there is novelty, the embarrassment of two young people discovering each other in the typical Indian situation where physical touch precedes emotional contact. As the novelty wears, the Rana becomes absorbed in the affairs of the state and the imminent war with the Mughal. And Mira feels the frustration of a wife whose husband is not available. Her sexual and emotional demands grow uncontrollably. Her love is big and as she naively runs after him, he withdraws further. But her husband is not equal to her love and she becomes disillusioned.

  Added to this is the failure of not having a son. She wonders if she has let her husband down in not giving him an heir. She becomes victim to a palace rumour that she is barren. She despairs and in her vulnerability she almost succumbs to her cousin Jai, who secretly loves her and is one of the few who understand her. At this point she turns to her personal god, Krishna, the dark, erotic god of love, and entreats him to give her a son—a natural thing for a lonely woman to do in order to win her husband back. Soon she finds, however, that she is transferring her love to her god and has become victim to a new attachment. The Rana, unable to understand her preoccupation with Krishna, thinks that she has a lover. He discovers, however, that he was wrong, but he begins to think that she is not quite balanced. Others think her strange behaviour may be the result of her barrenness—perhaps, she is possessed.

  Mira’s battle to master her insane attachment to her god and her eventual realization that she can master it constitute a fulfilment. In her mastery is her sainthood. From a reality in itself, the image of Krishna has become a symbol of a greater reality beyond her. At last she is at peace. This then is the inner logic for the transformation of a human being into a love-obsessed bhakti saint. I am not quite sure that it works entirely. After all, there are many neglected, barren wives who do not become saints. But at least it is an attempt at understanding what happened to Mira. Most renderings of her story don’t even make an attempt—they just assume that she was born a saint. I find that unsatisfactory. Moreover, saints do not work well on the stage—you have to humanize them. The other theme that I have explored is the tragedy of her husband who has to suffer the pain and misery of this transformation—the price he has to pay, so to speak, so she can become a saint.

  While Larins Sahib was in the genre of the ‘well-made play’, Mira could only succeed as non-natural theatre with lots of song and dance. But I had little experience with theatre craft and for months I struggled with this problem. Then, one day my company transferred me to the head office in New York. This was in 1969 when Grotowski was the rage and New Yorkers were mesmerized by his concept of ‘total theatre’. The city abounded in experimental groups. One of these was La Mama, under the able leadership of Ellen Stewart. The enormously successful rock musical Hair had started there. I was completely transported by the possibilities that had suddenly opened up for my second play. La Mama’s approach to my play reminded me of our ‘total theatre’ in the Tamasha of Maharashtra, the Yakshagana of Mysore, the Bhawai of Gujarat, the Jatra of Bengal.

  When Ellen Stewart accepted my first, inadequate draft of Mira, I could not believe it. It needed the young Martin Brenzell of La Mama to introduce me to the magic of theatre—to teach me that theatre could be created minimally with the body movements of the actors. Since naturalistic dialogue was out of the question, I began to conceive of Mira as ritualistic theatre and I began to rewrite the play using aphoristic dialogue. Martin Brenzell found equity actors who had been trained by Martha Graham and could also sing. David Walker wrote the music for two musicians and soon we were in business. Setting Mira’s bhajans to American rock music was a brilliant stroke—Mira would have approved.

  Directors do not like playwrights interfering with productions. Brenzell’s solution was to hold rehearsals from midnight to five in the morning. Since I had a regular nine-to-five job, this turned out to be an effective strategy. Occasionally, we would meet at 3 p.m. for breakfast (yes, for breakfast!) at his favourite cafe in the East Village and he would fill me in on the progress of the production. Nevertheless, I did go to a few rehearsals and each time I left enthralled. The entire play had been set to music and dance. All the actors were on stage all the time and they made beautiful pictures with their bodies. When Mira said, ‘I am an ant on a matchstick bit at both ends,’ the actors made such a picture with their bodies. The problem was that Brenzell was never satisfied and he would change the picture every night. The actors complained that they felt they were rehearsing a new play every night right up to opening night. In the end, Brenzell’s was an exciting interpretation. Clive Barnes of the New York Times gave it a rave review, and I felt taller by a few centimetres.

  There have been many productions since, including Alyque Padamsee’s visual enactment in Bombay with backward and forward projected slides. It was stylish but static. There was even a production in Spanish with a lovely translation by Enrique Hett that was published by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. M.K. Raina’s production with Jawahar Wattle’s music brought back some of the energy, but none has equalled the glory of the La Mama production.

  On 9 Jakhoo Hill

  After writing two plays based on historic personages, I thought I would turn to contemporary concerns. Hence, my next play is set in more recent times. On one level 9 Jakhoo Hill is about the changing order—the old middle class giving way to the new. Ansuya and her family belong to the old class and Deepak and Chitra to the new. Although this change had begun in the India of the 1960s, when the play is set, it accelerated in the 1990s; hence the play resonated with audiences when it was performed in the mid-1990s and continues to attract audiences today.

  The most striking feature of contemporary India, as I noted in my book India Unbound, is the rise of a confident new middle class. What I wrote there might serve as useful background to this play:

  The new middle class is full of energy and drive and is making things happen. That it goes about it in an uninhibited and amoral fashion is also true. It is different from the older bourgeoisie, which was leisurely, tolerant, and ambiguous. The new class is street-smart; it has had to fight to rise from the bottom, and it has learnt to manoeuvre the system. It is easy to despair over its v
ulgarity, its new rich mentality and its lack of education. But whether India can deliver the goods depends a great deal on it.

  This new middle class is displacing the older bourgeoisie—people like my grandfather and father—which first emerged in the 19th century with the spread of English education. It had produced the professionals who had stepped into the shoes of the departing English in 1947, and have since monopolised the rewards of the society. The chief virtue of the old middle class was that it was based on education and merit with relatively free entry, but it was also a class alienated from the mass of people and unsure of its identity. The new middle class, on the other hand, is based on money, drive, and an ability to get things done. Whereas the old class was liberal, idealistic and inhibited, the new order is refreshingly free from colonial hang-ups.

  We may feel regret at the eclipse of the old bourgeoisie, especially because it possessed the unique characteristic of being a class based on free entry, education and capability. We may feel equally uneasy that a new class based on money is replacing it. However, this is not a new phenomenon. This has happened repeatedly in all societies, particularly after the advent of the industrial revolution …. When India became independent, the middle class was tiny—around five per cent of the population—but we had a clear idea of what our parents wanted us to grow up to be. They wanted us to be nice Indian boys, well-bred, handsome, intelligent, and good at games. We were groomed to be brown sahibs, the rightful rulers of free India. They educated us at private schools. Those who could afford it sent theirs to Doon and Mayo (even when it pinched their pockets.) We became good at cricket and tennis and adequate at studies. ‘He is a good all-rounder,’ was the model held up before us. After school, we went on to Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College or Presidency College in Calcutta and Madras. A few lucky ones even managed to go to Oxford and Cambridge. We were expected to acquire the basic intellectual equipment at the university, but not to become scholars.

  After college, we were ready to join the IAS or industry or the professions—all the pleasant riches for which the older Indian bourgeoisie groomed its young. With secure jobs in our pockets, we were married off to good middle or upper middle class girls whom we courted in the Gymkhana clubs and in hill-stations during our summer holidays. We were ready to become pillars of the establishment and repeat the process with our young. As we prospered in our jobs, we built houses in South Delhi and went to lots of stylish parties where we met out friends, rubbed shoulders with diplomats and enjoyed the wit of the intellectual elite of our land. Could one have a better recipe for the enviably happy life? We had fulfilled the dreams of our fathers. But why then, with all our advantages, do we feel a gnawing pain in the gut?

  We were Macaulay’s children, not Manu’s. Our ambivalence goes back to that day when Thomas Macaulay persuaded the British government to teach English to Indians. Our position is similar to Rammohun Roy’s, who had two houses in Calcutta. One was his ‘Bengali house’, the other his ‘European house.’ In the Bengali house he lived with his wife and children in the traditional Indian way. The ‘European house’, on the other hand, was tastefully done up with English furniture and was used to entertain his European friends. Someone teased him, saying that everything in the Bengali house is Bengali except Rammohun Roy; and everything in the European house is European except Rammohun Roy. The dilemma of the postcolonial ‘brown sahib’ was similar. We could live our hypocritical lives only for so long; ultimately we had to question our recipe for the enviably happy life.9

  Rai Sahib is a caricature of this class, but even the sensitive Karan Chand, who is aware of this problem, is a victim. This parody of our inner lives—one foot in India and the other in the West—is rapidly and happily vanishing after the 1990s as we are more relaxed today and the minds of the young, as I mentioned, have became decolonized.

  9 Jakhoo Hill is about many things. It is about the hold of Indian mothers on their sons, about a fading class clinging foolishly to spent dreams, about the incestuous obsessions of ageing uncles. But the main theme is the betrayal of sexual love. Traditional Indian social life is fundamentally incomprehensible to the West largely because we Indians have always regarded sexual passion as a relatively trivial matter. As a result we set higher value upon filial rather than marital love. The Indian male appears to Western eyes as effeminate and a ‘mummy’s boy’ because he often gives precedence to his mother over his wife. The modern Indian male, however, is caught in a dilemma. Modernity demands of him that he think of sexual love as a chief source of virtue. He is thus in a dilemma of conflicting values between his ‘traditional’ duty to his mother and his modern duty to his wife. Generally speaking, he tends to make a mess of both and a fool of himself in the bargain.

  I set the play in Simla (now Shimla) because I grew up there in the 1950s and I was familiar with its society. I had seen or heard the talk of Rai Sahibs and Amritas throughout my childhood. In time, I set it during the Diwali of 1962 when the country was at war with China. I think this was a great turning point—the war ended our age of innocence and shattered our Nehruvian dreams. Nehru died soon afterwards and our society also began to change. With the coming of Indira Gandhi values began to depart from our political life and governance became more and more immoral. A new personalized style of politics came into being. Institutions started to erode especially in the Congress party.

  As the play opens, Ansuya’s family, which has seen better times before the partition of the country, broods over the old days. They are being forced to sell their house to pay off their debts. Ever since her father died, her uncle Karan has been Ansuya’s companion. The noble beauty of his mind draws him to her and they share an idyllic life of books. For Karan too Ansuya’s family is the only one he has known. He is a professor, more comfortable with thought than action. He has not been a success in the eyes of the world, and has reached the twilight when hopes are fast beginning to fade, and life is becoming a constant looking back. He needs his niece more than he realizes but is unwilling to admit his excessive interest in her. She is aware of his feelings towards her and this occasionally bothers her. But Ansuya is really troubled by her static, decaying, mental existence. She yearns for the city where people do things. She feels stifled by her closed life and the incestuous elite that makes up Simla’s society. Into this quiet, desperate idleness comes Deepak, full of energy and ambition, and infects everyone.

  This play lay in a drawer, gathering dust for twenty years. When I moved to Delhi in the mid-1990s, I gave it to Bhaskar Ghose, who saw something in it and he persuaded the Yatrik troupe to perform it under the director Sunit Tandon. We held a series of readings and I realized that it needed a fair amount of work. After that it became a sort of collaboration between the Yatrik cast and me. I gave them plenty of room to improvise and they returned the compliment, and I think the play improved.

  This has turned out to be a longer introduction than I had planned. I have followed, I find, in the tradition established by Dryden and avidly emulated by Bernard Shaw in which the author weighs a volume of plays with a long preface. The logic seems to have been that if the reader did not get his money’s worth from the plays he might be consoled with a voluminous introduction. Shaw’s prefaces bear only a faint relation to the plays they introduce. They often present the mental climate in which the play came to life—and the mental climate is a significant quality of Shavian playwriting. In this introduction I have attempted to do the same—albeit more modestly—to portray both the historical climate of the times where the plays are set and the mental climate of the times when I wrote the play.

  Oxford University Press published Larins Sahib in 1970 in England, and Oxford India brought out my plays for the first time in a single volume in 2001. When Penguin expressed a desire to reissue that anthology ten years later, I was delighted. I have happily updated this introduction. It seems to me that there is no greater compliment for a writer than that someone should want to read you. And when it comes to plays, the greate
r tribute is to be performed. And I hope that this new volume will lead to many more productions.

  July 2011

  Notes

  1. William Strunk and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

  2. Baron C. Von Hugel. Travellers in Punjab and Kashmir. London, 1845, p. 293.

  3. Lepel Griffin. Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Barrier between Our Growing Empire and Central Asia. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905, pp. 9–10.

  4. J.S. Grewal. The Sikhs of the Punjab, Part 2, Volume 3, New Cambridge History of India. Ed. G. Johnson, et al. Cambridge, 1990, p. 127.

  5. M.K. Naik. ‘The Three Avatars of Henry Lawrence: A Study of Gurcharan Das’ Larins Sahib’. In The Literary Criterion 12 (2 & 3). Ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah, 1976.

  6. Hume. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. 1931, p. 136.

  7. Priyadas’s commentary on Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal, written in AD 1712, has shaped the historical work on Mirabai. There is only one indisputably central association that is known that is linked with her name, namely, that as a woman Mira spurned her caste and family obligations in order to live out a life with Krishna. Nabhadas began his entry on Mira in the Bhaktamal by saying that Mira left her clan ( kul) and society and all notions of decorum in order to worship Krishna. Priyadas’s account of Mira provided two other details which were missing in Nabhadas. One was the fact that she was born in Merta, the other that she was married to the Rana of Chittor. Priyadas then recounted Mira’s refusal to pay obeisance to the Sisodiya goddess ( kuldevi). See Parita Mukta, Upholding the Common Life: The Community of Mirabai, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. It is the best scholarly attempt to come to grips with the biographical material on Mirabai.

  8. Parita Mukta, ibid., has confirmed this in her book.