The Bombay modern in four languages

Abstract

This article examines the four language theatres of Bombay – Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and English – whose differing histories propelled them at various times during the 1960s and 1970s towards their own forms of modernity. It aims to cite, as examples, the most significant plays of the times to demonstrate that it was, at least partly, the receiving community of each language theatre that influenced how far it was prepared to go down the path to the modern. The context for the modern in theatre is provided by visual art as represented by the Progressive Artists’ Group, poetry as represented by B.S. Mardhekar, Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar, and short fiction as represented by writers like Vyankatesh Madgulkar and Arvind Gokhale. Constrained as it was by space, funds and audience acceptance, the modern in theatre is defined differently from the modern in poetry, literature and the visual arts. In order to present the overall cultural texture of the times, the article also shows how closely theatre interacted with cinema and poetry during these decades.

Keywords:

• Henrik Ibsen
• Vijay Tendulkar
• Satyadev Dubey
• Andha Yug
• Arvind Joshi
• Theatre Group

Notes

1. Collectors of old records, like Suresh Chandvankar of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, have in their collections 78 rpm gramophone records of several leading musicians of the early 20th century including two stalwarts of the Jaipur-Atrauli school of Hindustani classical music, Kesarbai Kerkar and Mallikarjun Mansur, both of whom were recorded in Bombay for the British-based Broadcast label around 1935. Since the arrival of talkie films in 1931, all of them replete with songs, music recording studios flourished as a vital ancillary of the Bombay film industry.

2. Abhiruchi was a small-format literary magazine that Purshottam Atmaram Chitre and his wife Vimal Chitre began publishing in 1943. The financial odds they faced in pursuing this enterprise finally forced them to close it down in 1951. However, while it lasted the fiction, poetry and criticism that it published made an enormous contribution to the new, often iconoclastic, Marathi literary canon.

3. Brass bands are a sine qua non of Indian wedding processions, which are led by men dressed in gaudy livery playing popular Hindi film hits on pipes, drums and trumpets. The cacophonous music they make stands at the other end from classical music.

4. The neighbourhood was called Bhangwadi because of the many shops retailing bhang (opium) that were dotted around it at one time. The real name of the building that housed the theatre was Hathi Building. But since it became popular for its theatre, both the building and the genre of plays staged there came to be known as Bhangwadi theatre.

5. Parsi theatre was the entrepreneurial result of Bombay’s encounter with the west. The Parsis of Bombay (Zoroastrians from Iran who had fled to the western coast of India sometime in the 10th century to escape Muslim persecution) formed theatre companies in the mid-19th century to entertain a bourgeois class of spectators with a hybrid form of theatre marked by sophistication of stagecraft, glamour, music, extravagant sets and costumes and little connection with the real world. It was precisely on account of this absence of cultural specificity that it became so universally popular, cutting through language barriers, and influencing the form that Bombay film later took.

6. Badal Sircar (1925–2011) broke away from the proscenium stage in the 1970s to create plays that could be staged for the common people in open spaces. This made him the guru of street theatre, which became the chosen theatrical mode of activist groups throughout India in the 1980s. Out of the 50 plays that he wrote, directed and acted in, his most translated and widely performed play remains Evam Indrajit (And Indrajit, 1963).

7. J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) wrote a series of plays in the 1930s and 1940s that came to be called “Time Plays” because they played with different concepts of time.

8. A cineaste and an avid reader of Marathi and English literature, Tendulkar also wrote the preface to Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal’s first collection of poems, Golpitha (Dhasal 1975), named after Bombay’s red light district.

9. Nagpur-based Mahesh Elkunchwar was inspired to write plays after he saw Tendulkar’s Mi Jinklo Mi Harlo (I Have Won, I Have Lost; 1961). He began with hard-hitting one-act plays (one of them is about the brutal hazing of college students) that the literary magazine Satyakatha published. He went on to write 13 full-length plays. All of them have been translated into English, and many into Hindi, Bengali and Kannada. Pune-based Satish Alekar is best known for his three early plays, Mahanirvan (The Dread Departure; 1974), Mahapoor (The Deluge; 1975) and Begum Barve (1979) (collected in Alekar 2009). All three plays, like the rest of his writing, are marked by an ironic view of the world, a quirky sense of humour, and wit that expresses itself through unexpected turns of language from the colloquial to the high-flown and back again. Most of his plays have been translated into English and other languages.

10. Bombay-based Vijaya Mehta (b. 1934), who acted in over 80 plays, was one of the first theatre directors to create a group, Rangayan, for the production of experimental plays. It was formed in 1960 as a theatre laboratory that would produce plays as experiments and restrict themselves to six shows of each. Her actors were keen to do as many shows as they could. Rangayan broke up in 1972 on this point. Mehta soon moved to the commercial stage while the splinter group, Awishkar, continued performing experimental plays.

11. P.S. Rege (1910–78) was a prominent poet of the 1960s and 1970s. A lecturer and later professor of economics in government colleges, he also wrote two verse plays. Sadanand Rege (1923–82) was a short fiction writer and poet. His first poem was published in Abhiruchi in 1948.

12. C.T. Khanolkar (1930–76) was a short story writer, novelist and playwright. Of his three critically acclaimed plays, one was Avadhya (Unvanquished; 1970), of which eminent critic Madhav Manohar said it was the first adult play in Marathi. Khanolkar translated Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle for a Marathi production directed by Vijaya Mehta.

13. IPTA was founded in Kolkata in 1942 with branches in other cities including Bombay. It was the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India.

14. Andha Yug (Blind Age; 1962) was based on the last days of the Kurukshetra war, which forms the core of the epic Mahabharata.

15. Gieve Patel (b. 1940), doctor, painter, poet and playwright, had his first collection of poetry, How Do You Withstand, Body (Patel 1976), published by Clearing House. See the interview with him in this special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

16. Toni Patel was a theatre director and founder of the theatre group Stage Two. She was married to Gieve Patel.

17. See further on Nandu Bhende in the article “Rock around the clock: In 1970s Bombay” by Sidharth Bhatia in this special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.