The politics of dark ecologies in Deepan Sivaraman’s Peer Gynt

Abstract

This article analyses Deepan Sivaraman's 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876) and argues that the production's scenography evoked scepticism toward the Indian nation-state. This scepticism came as a direct consequence of the scenography's ability to alienate the audience through the formation of dark ecological environments, with the help of three characters: the elf princess, the son of the elf princess, and a hell hound, a concept invented by Sivaraman while adapting the verse play of the Norwegian playwright into Malayalam and English. The dark ecological aesthetics of the production functioned like Bertolt Brecht's Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt, offering a dialectical point to the audience to reterritorialize their understanding of the Indian nation-state and its ecology. In the first part of the article, I analyse the Indian dramatic form of bhana used by Sivaraman to articulate the discourse of what Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology,' and argue that the bhana's satirical narrative remained central to writings of Otherness. In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how the production mounted imbricated narratives of ecological awareness on the stage through the figures of the elf princess, her son, and a hell hound that relentlessly witnessed the capitalist journey of Peer. By offering an active agency to these figures through the scenography, Sivaraman's production interrogated the Indian nation-state's definition of ecology. Significantly, in its choice of a non-human witness, the production destabilized the human centre and pointed towards a post-human ecological turn. Although Ibsen's aesthetics have been used countless times in India to stage the anxieties of the female gender and minority communities, this was the first time they were employed in India to stage dark ecology; Sivaraman's production began where Ibsen's play ends. In the first scene itself, the audience members found themselves face to face with Peer's spirit - rather than the flesh and blood Peer of Ibsen’s play - begging God for another chance at life so that he could become a better man. When Peer is offered a second chance, he uncannily uses it to become a non-resident businessman involved in mining. The performance showed how scenography could be used to articulate a dark and depressing ecological awareness.

Notes

1 The first bhanas followed the advice of the Indian poetics (Natyasastra) that the bhanas ‘should be made devoid of the

graceful style (kaisiki style)’ (Bharata 1950: 356), but the later bhanas used kaisiki vritti. The Sanskrit scholar S. K. De writes:

the older writers, probably having regard to the comic character of the bhanas of their time, declare themselves in favour of the bharati, while the persistently erotic character of later bhanas probably made Visvanatha [a Sanskrit theoretician of the fourteenth century who developed a system of poetics in his book called Sahityadarpana] allow an exception in favour of the kaisiki. (De 1926: 68)

I agree with De and, in this article, I follow the trajectory of later bhanas, which were published after the thirteenth century.

2 Ghosh clarifies that ‘the environmental uncanny is not the same as the uncanniness of the supernatural: it is different precisely because it pertains to non-human forces and beings. The ghosts of literary fiction are not human either, of course, but they are certainly represented as projections of humans who were once alive’ (2018: 42–3).

3 According to Bharata, it is rasa that binds the play and the primary purpose of the ancient Sanskrit theatre is the creation of rasa.