'ART & SOUL
The golden era of theatre

A recent theatre festival, held in Bangalore, focused on the old ‘Natak Mandali’ or
the ‘Company Natak’ tradition, writes B. N. Goswamy

I remember from my childhood — I could not have been more than seven or eight years old at the time — witnessing a performance by a travelling theatrical troupe that came to a little town called Shakargarh, now in Pakistan. My father, a judicial officer, who held court 10 days in a month away from his district headquarters, was on a tour of the place, and we children were accompanying him.

The touring company, as it was called, had come and pitched its tents in the open space behind the civil rest house in which we were staying. They set up a raised stage with the roughest of materials; the curtain with ‘sceneries’ painted on them were all installed during the day, as we stood around and watched.

The musical, mixing a great deal of singing by the actors with dialogues which were also mostly in rhyme — following the tradition that I now know to be Parsi theatre — was titled Wamaq Azra. None of us understood what the title meant, and it was only much later that I found out that these were the names of two lovers from a famous Persian love legend.

There was excitement when a group of barkers went around the town distributing handbills and making announcements on a horn concerning the performance. There was no entry fee: some local patron must have sponsored the play. A fair crowd gathered in the evening; we children sneaked out of our rest house rooms and stood at the back. There were no elaborate lights, no sets but for the painted backdrops, but there was music before the performance began for keeping the audience quiet and entertained.

I recall absolutely nothing of the story or the quality of the performance. All I vividly remember is the sustained music played on traditional instruments throughout the performance, and occasional outbursts of despair from the actors. Clearly, it was an emotion-charged play, full of situations that must have been easy for the spectators to comprehend and identify with. For me, much remained opaque: the language was too high-flown, being some kind of Persianised Urdu, and the plot was beyond my reach.

But the music that belonged to the performance apart, what stands out in my mind is the sound of suppressed sobbing that came from the audience. The situation in the play must have been of unbearable grief arising from some kind of irreversible separation, and several members of the audience seemed to be choked with feeling, silent tears flowing, mouths dry, a lump in their throats that evidently refused to go away.

The performance had obviously led to a certain melting of the heart. I remember seeing with a sense of bewilderment grown up men wiping tears silently from their eyes and holding their heads between their hands — trying to suppress emotions, anxious not to display them — covering the lower parts of their faces in the coarse cotton sheets that served as wraps around their shoulders in the slight chill of the evening. The spectators seemed to be a rustic, uncouth group of people, but evidently they responded to the performance and were deeply moved by it. Today I would say, recalling that evening, that they were experiencing an aesthetic emotion occasioned by the performance."

This long passage above, really an excerpt, comes from an essay that I wrote a long time ago when I was mounting an exhibition on rasa at the Grand Palais in Paris, which later travelled to the Asian Art Museum at San Francisco under the title The Essence of Indian Art. And if I quote it here, without so much as an apology, it is because I believe that the reader is unlikely to have read it before, and that it has some relevance to an event that was organised a few weeks ago. That event, which celebrated the ‘Golden Era of Theatre’, was held at Bangalore under the auspices of Ranga Shankara, that lively theatre which is more than a theatre and holds year after year a Theatre Festival. I did not witness the Festival but, judging from the sizeable programme booklet which friends of mine brought me, there must have been wonderful riches on view.

There were Plays and Film screenings, a Seminar and a Photo Exhibition, a Theatre and Arts Appreciation Course and Solo Performances. And an impressive array of names was associated: Girish Karnad, playwright and movie director; Arundhati Nag, festival director; Sadanand Menon, thinker and ‘arts editor’; Shanta Gokhale, critic and journalist. At the same time, there were performances directed by gifted men and women: Amal Allana, Satish Alekar, Nageswara Rao, B. Jayashree, among others.

Thespians like Nagarathnamma and Master Hirannaiah presented solo performances. What also set the festival completely apart from others of its kind was its focus on the old ‘Natak Mandali’ or the ‘Company Natak’ tradition, something that in a manner of speaking had started dominating the world of performances in India from the middle of the 19th century onwards. The air one can imagine must have been filled with nostalgia with everyone speaking of great names of the past, and great productions. There was talk of Wajid Ali Shah, the Nawab of Lucknow, who himself danced and sang in a court production of "Inder Sabha" in the 1850s. The Bhagavatara Mela was remembered for it was that which inspired the founding of a theatre company patronised by the ruler of Sangli as early as 1842. The great traditions of Maharashtra and Bengal and Karnataka in this field were recalled, reconstructed and discussed, I am sure. Ravi Verma, the painter, it was rightly mentioned, was greatly influenced by the form of the ‘Company Natak’. This, as Arundhati Nag wrote, was "popular, secular art for all, the commons and the elite. It was the equaliser."

And then, of course, at the Festival were performed pieces based on the lives of old ‘Natak Mandali’ actors: specially chosen to go with its focus, the Golden Age of Theatre. How one wishes one had been there. Satish Alekar’s Begum Barve of which one saw a stunning performance in Chandigarh some years back, for instance. Or the Bengali classic, Nati Binodini, based on the life and fate of the actress Binodini that Amal Allana directed. In the midst of everything that was happening at the Ranga Shankara — film-screenings and discussions and photo-exhibitions — it could not have been easy to forget that, to use Hamlet’s words, "The Play is the Thing".

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