[0:10]Welcome, Girish Karnad. Uh, for everybody knows is a He's more famous than anybody sitting over here. Not only because he's a film and TV actor, director, poet, but above all, he's a theatre. He was 26 when he produced his one of his really most outstanding plays, Tuglak. Uh, and I can't help being a personal note here, that in the early 70s, Uh there was a production of Tuglak, directed by Om Shipuri. The best production I believe is, you know, the one that was directed by Rahman Kazi with Manohar Singh as the lead. There was also another production which Shipuri directed, and there was a famous scene of the of the, of the older soldier and the and the young soldier. And in my amateur theatre days, I played the role of the young soldier. I had a couple of lines. So, uh, so yeah, he's known to to me and to everybody for a long time. Uh, this is as you know, the fifth Golden Jubilee lecture. uh, in a series, uh to celebrate the 50th year of the CSDS. Uh, and, uh, Girish has been was preceded in this series by uh Sharad Golak, Bina Das, Arjuna Padurai, and David Shulman. The other thing I want to tell you was that Girish is a is a member of the Board of Governors of CSDS, so we have we have claim on him. Not just as a as an important, uh, playwright and a winner of many, many awards, but also as as one of us, he's part of the, uh, part of the, small community that we that we call the CSDS. Now, Girish's, one can very easily say without any inhibitions that he is one of the founders of modern Indian theatre, along with Badal Sircar, Mohan Rakesh, and Dharmvir Bharti. Undoubtedly, one of the founders of modern Indian theatre. Uh, the most distinctive feature of Karnad's plays is the deployment of the of historical and mythological resources to tackle very important contemporary themes. For example, Tuglak, as many people know already, can be seen as an allegorical tale of of the Nehruvian era. The use of traditional Indian narrative material and modes of performance to create a radically modern urban theatre, a very different from the Euro-inspired theatre of the middle class, which directly represented, you know, the the main office where European influence, uh, is one of the, you know, very distinguishing features of of of Girish's, uh, theatre. He has a very, uh, uh vibrant and and a sensitive relation to regional folk tales, the great Indian traditions and historical memory. And in in doing, in relating to these traditions in the way that he does, he allows the mimetic and the mythical to be as important a source of self-understanding as the more dominant intellectual reflective mode that has been pretty dominant, you know, in the in the in the mainstream Western sensibility. Mimetic and mythical cultures that have their beginning in the far more distant past, for him, are not displaced, uh, or lost, but only reorganized under new conditions. Uh, and given this very wholesome comprehensive understanding of what collective self-understanding is, uh, he, I mean, somehow give even, even though he does this, he somehow manages to in his place, he manages to appeal to the intellect more than to, you know, mere emotions. I mean he does, of course, evoke a sense of the, you know, the the the emotional emotional, but but his primary appealing even though he's, you know, moving in his in these other genres, he manages to, you know, get our get our intellect going in some ways. Uh, like his, uh, contemporary, if not predecessor, uh Anant Murthy, Karnad is probably firmly committed to multilingualism. He could easily have written in Konkani, he could have written in the English language perhaps, better than Konkani, but he chose to write in Kannada. Uh, he has always fought, like Anant Murthy has fought hierarchies and binary oppositions between the national and the regional, the center and the periphery, the global and the local, the traditional and the modern, and so on. And he's explored the dilemmas and the paradoxes facing individuals and societies as they transform one another. And that's, uh, one of, uh, one of very interesting features of of Karnam's writing. Uh, I I'll end with by by conveying something and by using his own words. And I quote, he says, my generation was the first to come of age after India became independent of British rule. It therefore had to face a situation in which tensions implicit until then had to come out in the open and demanded to be resolved without apology or self-justifications. Tension between the cultural past of the country and its colonial past, between the attraction of Western mode of thought and our own traditions, and finally the various visions of the future that opened up once the common cause of political freedom was achieved. This is the historical context that gave rise to my plays, that is his plays, and those of my contemporaries, the contemporaries of course being Vijay Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh, Dharmvir Bharti, or of course being being the Kannada play writer, the Kannada language. Uh, well, I think I better stop, said enough. Um, uh, you will see in in the lecture many of these things that Karnad has to call and a lot more. So Girish, it's a real honor to invite you to speak here. Thank you. Thank you. I'm overwhelmed actually. Over the last 25, 30 years, I've always looked on CSDS as a centre of intellectual activity of academic excellence. I've admired the work that's been done here. I've followed the work. I've been associated with it sometime. But I myself never been an academic. I've never been a teacher, except in theatre. And therefore I have always admired those who think intellectually and, well, the number of, mighty intellectuals if I may use that phrase here, who are present here, whose presence I can feel here. You said that last speaker was Arjuna Padurai, something like that is enough to squash anyone's spirit, I think. I certainly feel, don't, I'm not up to it. Anyway, thank you very much for taking the risk of inviting me here. I'm an entertainer. I'm basically a playwright. Uh, it's it seems easy to say what what is a playwright? A playwright is someone who writes a play. And if you're looking in the Western culture and so, you have the whole and even in Indian culture, when you look back, you think there is a vast tradition, a long and ancient tradition of playwriting. You go back to Bhasa, who was supposed to who was supposed to have written in the second century BC and so on. But the phrase is very ambiguous in Indian culture, because what happens is from second century BC to about sixth century AD, you get Sanskrit plays, you get playwrights. They write plays. You get Kalidasa, you get uh, Bhavbhuti, you get Shudraka, and so on, and so on. Then around the sixth or the seventh century, around then, it's very difficult to define, the playwright ceases to exist. In fact, India after that, the number of good plays go down and there are almost no playwrights worth mentioning from about the 8th century to the 19th century. Now, this doesn't mean there are no plays in India. No, there's a lot of activity. In fact, all the forms that we call traditional forms, all emerge during this period because of the bhakti and the Sufi and rather the musical revolution and so on. But the fact remains that there are very few people that you can pick up during this period that you could call a playwright. You know, and this is a very strange phenomenon, and the reason why this I want to get rid of this out of my way because I'll stand here as a playwright, and suddenly, and this is going to be the point around which I'll build my lecture, suddenly, in the 19th century, the playwright reappears. And he reappears thanks to the colonial influence, the British bring him back again. And this disappearance and appearance of the playwright is is is is interesting really phenomenon. You see what happens during these thousand years, during the period that the vernaculars came up and Sanskrit receded in influence in the cultural field, is that in the vernacular, the whole nation, the whole notion that someone will actually sit down and write out a play and give it to the actors and the actor will take it and he'll learn it by rote and they will come and repeat it is unacceptable. You know, this is completely second language notion of theater. You know, in all the Indian languages, what was expected is that the playrwrite improvised, the the actor improvised. He went on stage, he rehearsed earlier, he learned his music, he learned his paces, but as it happens even now, in Kathakali, as it happens in Yakshagana, it happens in nautanki, in fact, that the actors go on stage and they improvise, they, you know, and and they create the whole play. So the actor was also the playwright, the playwright was the actor, and this a whole notion that he had to come ready-made, just was not acceptable till you come, uh to about the 19th century. 19th century and then you have the English influence, the English come, we have the company not a theater and it is this, there is a remark there that occurs in the 19th century with which I'm going to start. That's the title of my lecture. Annasaheb Kirloskar, the great, uh, theater man in Marathi, he started, uh, he's, uh, on 30th October 1880, he staged Shakuntal in Marathi, and that is the beginning of the Marathi musical. You know, the whole musical tradition, musical theater of Marathi starts and a lot of other things start about which I will talk about with that particular, you know, it's a very significant moment and the man was aware of the significance of what he was doing. He did Shakuntal and he did a play called Saubhadr and he died young. So the entire modern Marathi Sangeet Natak tradition which then goes on and goes on till today, in fact, it's that extent, was started by Annasaheb Kirloskar. And there in the preface to Saubhadr, he says, I want to create rasa in the English fashion. You know, in Greji Padhti chi Rasa Nirmiti. That's his exact phrase in Marathi. Greji Padhti chi Rasa Nirmiti. Now, what does it mean? Now, this is a very strange concept because rasa one would think was the ultimate in essential Indian aesthetic terminology. You know, it's something that now, now that we have the Natya Shastra, we can trace back to the 9th and the 10th chapters of Natya Shastra and so on. In his time, the text of Natya Shastra was probably not available to him, but he probably knew it from Dasharupaka or Abhinaya Darpana and so on. But the point is he says, I want to create, and this is the notion that I want to explore today in as far as I'm, as from the point of view of an entertainer, I said, not as a scholar. Because the whole concept of rasa obviously means something more to him than it did to the Sanskrit aestheticist. What it means to him, I think, is entertainment. Not dereliction. What he, he is there, he is a professional, he is doing the play, he is doing it an audience, and he says having succeeded in his first play, he says in his second play, now I want to create rasa in the English fashion. And this particular transition from the concept of an aesthetic concept of rasa to as something of a professional concept is a very interesting moment in the history of Indian theatre. Um, you know, I even today, the the the difference between art and culture is not as different as we think. As you know Marshall Mcluhan says in one place, a very perceptive remark, which I must say is, he says, an art form is only an entertainment form, which has lost its audience. You know, today something is, you know, today theatre is an entertainment form, tomorrow it loses its audience, it becomes an art form, film comes, film loses its audience, it becomes an art form. Today, so we have television, which is an art form, which is an entertainment form, and hopefully, it will become someday. And then so I'm going now to start with some basics, which you all of you will be completely familiar with, but it it enable me to start off my argument to some point, which is the beginning of the colonial, uh coming of the colonial, uh power in India. Two moments about which a lot has been written, and you must, forgive me for repeating the basic points. The first one, of course, is the introduction of English, and what the introduction of English did. Macaulay's minutes in 1833, how they changed our concept of thinking about ourselves, how they we started learning because through English to look at ourselves and analyze ourselves through concept, which were, uh, which came from outside. Uh, all kinds of concepts close to us like joint family, like, uh, religion, for instance, and so on. Uh, we started re-understanding in terms of English, that is one thing. Uh the interesting word which, uh, which is at the center, let me not use it very much but at the center of my argument is the word for culture, for instance. The word for culture actually comes from the German, has German origin, and Herder and others and it's associated with the folk and the people close to the, you must forgive me if I'm wrong of this but, close to people and so on. But when it is translated, when that word is picked up and imported into India, in Bengali, there was a debate on how to translate it. And Suniti Kumar Chatterjee suggested krishhti, which was close to culture because culture comes from agriculture. You know the whole notion of agriculture and so on. But at the word that ultimately won out was the one that was suggested by Rabindranath Tagore, which was Sanskriti. You know, Sanskriti and culture. But immediately, the meaning changes. With Sanskriti, you are an upper class. You're far away from the folk. You are right in the heart of the bhadralok, uh, and, you know, refinement and, although it's the same culture that you're supposed to be talking about, you have already got into another kind of discourse. Now, this is what the use of English and the concepts we get from English do to us all the time, that's the first thing. The second element in the colonial experience that I want to point out are the three colonial cities, uh about which Ashish has written so well and so many others, and whatever I'm going to say is more or less a synopsis of what he says. Which is that there were these three colonial cities, three I pick up, there were others that came up, but Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, uh, what makes them colonial is that there were no cities there before. There were villages. The British came as traders, they started factories, and the factories were started and around them Indian traders grew and soon that area, those areas became some kind of townships, with a white, uh, area, which was occupied by the the British, and then the black area, as it was explicitly called, which the Indian traders occupied. And these develop into, uh, the interesting thing there was that these cities were dominated by the British, it was the British culture. You see, to when I use the word a colonial culture, and this has been said, Thank you, uh, There were of course Indian cities. You know, there were cities like Lahore, there were cities like Delhi, there were cities like Nagpur or Pune or, uh, but the main difference that I see from my point of view, that between the colonial cities and the Indian cities, the traditional Indian cities, was that in the traditional Indian cities, there was a continuity of values between the cities and the countryside.
[18:43]That is, the people in the city were probably more arrogant than, you know, were arrogant towards those in the villages everywhere, that happens, but the values they believed in, like joint family, like religion, how to respond to your parents, what how who to marry, whether to marry the first cousin or second, those were common in a sense between the city and the hinterland. And there was a continuity of values, and of course there was a continuity of professions. I mean, lots of workers lived in villages and they came and worked in the cities and went back. So, this flow, this fluidity was there, while in the colonial cities there was a completely new culture which came up, which was the culture of free enterprise. 19th century was the great time of, uh, British free enterprise. So that here you get values like competition, that nepotism is bad, that one should, uh, allow to people, you know, the the the initiative to come up, that caste is wrong, uh, you know, and so on, the whole, whole setup of values changes in the initial cities. The main difference between the colonial city and the Indian city, I think, was that, while in the Indian city there was a continuity of values from the city to the hinterland, in the colonial city there was a complete disjuncture. You could almost come to the edge of the colonial city and the value stopped. Within that, within that area, uh, those values operated and Indians who, the Indian bourgeoisie that grew up in those cities, uh accepted those values in public life at least, and pretended to be anglicized and so on. Um, but as soon as they moved out of it and into the home, as Ashish has pointed out, these value cease to matter. A beautiful example of this is, uh, is a is a remark in Umrao Jaan Ada, um, you know, Umrao Jaan Ada. She was a courtesan of Lucknow. And she mentioned something that happened when, uh, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was the Nawab before the British came, um, to Lucknow. What happened, she gives a story, which is very interesting. There was a prince, a young prince, who fell in love with a young courtesan. And he went and he started pestering her and the young courtesan threw him out and said, you can't come in, and he was so heartbroken that he went and jumped into the river, trying to commit suicide. You know, the lover, heartbroken lover, but he had a rope and because of the rope, he didn't drown. He sort of floated down the river, and as he was floating down the river, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah came in his in his boat. He was boating in the evening and he saw this figure, this strange figure floating down the river and he fished him out and he asked him, what is it that and the man said, I'm trying to commit suicide. And the king wanted to know why and he said, you know, heartbroken, and so on. And Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was so moved that he made him an officer of the court. And he being an educated young man, he was a very good officer of the Nawab. Now, having told this story, Umrao makes a very interesting point. She says, such beautiful things used to happen in the days of yore. Now that the British have come, nothing matters except merit.
[22:06]She's extraordinarily perceptive, uh, comment on the values that had suddenly changed in the society. And now in the, these cities that came up, imitation of the British was easiest in the public sphere, and one of the areas where the imitation was most obvious was in the theatre. Because, you know, till the 19th century, theatre was looked upon, looked down upon in India. I've already mentioned that it was done by people who were doing nautanki and so on, but it was not done by educated people. It was actors and people, people who were doing theatre were considered lower down in the social scale. But with the coming of the British, theatre gets a new, um, a glamour. Because the British themselves idolized theatre, they did theatre in their clubs, they did plays, most of all, and I think this must have been a very strong pointer. The main subs acted in the place. These plays like Goldsmith or, uh, Sheridan and so on. They were done in, um, the clubs, and the main subs used to act. The Indians of course were not allowed to attend, but they could see from the edges. And theatre, and then there was of course Victorian groups which came from England, which came in, um, performed here and so on. As a result of which the Indian bourgeois, I particularly I'm talking about Bengali. It was a different situation because of the bhadralok situation. I'll come to that later. But in Bombay, what happens is that the Bombay bourgeoisie begins to imitate and starts theatre. The Parsis start theatre and the Parsi Natak company started. Natak companies come and they start, and these companies that come, that the theatre that comes from London, introduces two elements which are completely new to Indian theatre. First, first thing of course everyone has talked about, one is the, uh, that is the introduction of, uh, the proscenium theatre. You know, the British brought proscenium. Plays used to happen behind the proscenium, and, uh, traditionally Indian plays always happened in the open, there was no demarcation between the audience and the, no definite demarcation, there was a slight demarcation, uh, between the audience and the players. And, um, you know, we, we with the British theatre, you have proscenium, things happen behind, the audience is separated from, um, what's happening on stage, and there's a complete demarcation. That was one thing, of course, has been written about by a lot of people, but the more important thing that made a difference was the concept of ticketing. You know, the whole idea of selling tickets for entertainment was completely new in Indian society. Until the 19th century, entertainment was always free. Some prince or some officer, he sponsored a show. You know, if you wanted a son or if you wanted a daughter, or if you wanted to succeed somewhere, or you get a job, you went to the temple and you prayed and you said, well, I'm going to, uh, sponsor a show, and you sponsored the show, and then the audience was allowed to come. And the audience sat there. As a result of which, the audience had no investment in theatre. The audience didn't put in any money, it has no financial risk. As a result of which, the audience was capable of taking and did take a kind of aesthetic risk. If show went wrong, it was okay. I mean, you know, and the whole tradition we have of improvisation is tied up with this tradition of not selling tickets.
[25:52]Because, you know that that tradition today unfortunately is more or less disappeared, but continuous fortunately, even in, uh, in in music, you must have heard of great musicians coming drunk. Bhimsingh joshi is a great example. You know, I mean, you know, he would come drunk, he would fall asleep. I was there when, uh, the great Mali, the flutist in South India, too nights he came sloshed. And the audience came very beautifully, you know, the king first day and the sponsor said, sorry, sorry, come tomorrow, sorry, sorry. And third day, Mali came and prostrated himself and said, sorry, I'm, you know, I'm guilty so I'll play and he played beautifully. It was a marvel and everyone only talked of how beautifully he had played. And not a mention was made of the two previous nights when they had had to go back. Because there was no risk, you know, because that was what artists are supposed to do. And that was the risk that the audience was supposed to take, which is, you know, the artist can may do it or may not do it and so on. But the moment the audience starts paying money for your ticket, the audience starts demanding returns for that money. You know, once you buy a ticket for 10 rupees or five rupees, you demand five or 10 rupees worth of entertainment. You know, it becomes like a soap dish and you say, well, you know, there were several things happened. For instance, then if you are paying five rupees, then you want to know what is going to be shown in advance. So, you have to be promised, this will be shown, this will be shown. There will be eight songs, 10 sceneries, a five dances. Fine. Then someone who pays five rupees and comes and says, but you said eight songs, five sceneries, but there are only six songs. What happened to the two songs? You know, I want the two songs. So, the whole concept of entertainment becomes standardized. It becomes a commodity. This, the second thing that happened, and which really had very damaging effects on Indian, uh, theatre, is that it leads to replication. People see a play, they love it, they go home, they say, you know, it's beautiful. Let's go. And they bring the family, and if the play is different, they're upset.
[28:03]Then they know because they're paying money, and they say to their friends, people were, so that each show has to be the same as it was before. The whole point of improvisation was that plays could be different. That they could be one day, uh, you know, something could be, uh, may work, some next day it may not work. This whole concept goes off, and then a whole structure comes up. Where whereby, theatre as entertainment is commodified and promised in certain degrees. This kind of play will be given, there will be so many songs, there will be so many dances, the starts will come, the stars will come and so on. And this fits in perfectly, of course, with the free trade economy of of of the cities. And in Bombay at least, um, you have the Parsis, who come in, and the Parsis, uh, have Parsi theatre and they, the score Parsi theatre because money was put in by the Parsis. But soon they realized that doing plays about in Gujarati, which was their mother tongue, about, uh, Shahnameh and so on, doesn't work. The audience is Hindu, then they started a play, which would attract a Hindu audience. But most of the Hindu audience speak Urdu or Hindi. Uh, so they employ Muslim writers. So then you have a secular entertainment setup where you have Parsi managers, writing for a Hindu audience, with producing plays which were actually written, mainly by Muslims. And Agha Hashr Kashmiri and people like that, you know, so what happens ultimately is the entire element of ritual, entire element of ritual participation, which might have been there is taken out because you have so much secularization going on in the whole process of theatre, that the theatre becomes completely devoid of any values. Entertainment becomes a kind of a definition without values, without any kind of traditional undermining, underpinning to it. This is one thing. The second thing that the British did was, um, which was to really create quite a big problem for the Indian. They saw Shakespeare as the summum bonum of British culture. In British education, Shakespeare was pushed as the, you know, that he was taught, and Indians liked Shakespeare, of course, you know, he's a he's a great influence. And he and the playwright was presented as the the essence of British culture. Now, I think it's a sign of a defeated people that they always want to match the colonizers, and Indians had to match the British now. They had to find a playwright, but we had no playwrights, you see. As I said, for a thousand years, no vernacular playwrights had come up at all. If they had said Milton or if they had said, you know, some epic poet, that would have been another matter. We had epic poets and so on. If they had said, um, a singer or whatever it is, but suddenly they had brought out the one phenomenon that didn't exist in India, which was the playwright. You know, except in theatre. So there is a wise search for a playwright that would represent the the colonist culture and we find Kalidasa. Now, Kalidasa was always acknowledged as a great Sanskrit playwright, but he was never a national, um, you know, national or cultural icon. But in nationalism, of course, in the 19th century, of course, nationalism is also coming up, and Kalidasa represents this new identity, and this is seen, if you see, the translations that take place in the 19th century, not of Shakespeare, Shakespeare of course was translated, but translations of Kalidasa. Because in between 1860 and 1880, in Marathi, there are four translations of Kalidasa, and in Kannada, there are three. That is, within 20 years, within two neighboring states, there are seven translations of Shakuntal. And suddenly, it's almost as though each language had to possess a playwright.
[32:07]You had to have an answer to Shakespeare, you know? And, and of course, Shakespeare and Shakespeare, of course, was very popular and he was he I'm not going into the other details, for instance, that actually Indians discovered, I think, a psychology in Shakespeare. They didn't learn it from Freud or whatever his British were, but by studying Shakespeare. And this you can see it by from reading the reviews of Hamlet or Lear and so on. And if you look at 19th century, if you want to see the presence of Shakespeare, um, in Indian theatre, you should see 19th century Marathi theatre. I told you that in 1880, uh Annasaheb Kirloskar, um, did Shakuntal, but it's interesting that he does Shakuntal. That's what I mean. There is a word, you know, there is a going back to Kalidasa as though in in, uh, in, uh, in British, uh, in British Shakespeare and so on. And he, um, and he wants rasa in English fashion. Then there was another playrwrite and his name was Khadilkar. Now Khadilkar wrote a play called, um, Kichakvadh. You know the story of Kichak. Kichak tried to rape Draupadi and he was killed by Bhima and so on and so on. And the play was banned because the government of the British government said Kichak, well of course Draupadi. Draupadi must be Mother India. So that's okay. So who's trying to rape her? So they decided it was Lord Curzon. It was not explicitly said because, and the ban the play. And yet, Khadilkar, Khadilkar has a play written earlier called Sawai Madhav Raocha Mrityu, which is the historical play based on the death of Sawai Madhav Rao, in which the hero, Sawai Madhav Rao, is based on Hamlet, and the villain in is based on Iago. You know, so almost this these characters are plucked from as though they are living creatures in a historical play taken and put into the play to create psychological this. And even, uh, further example of Shakespeare's influence is Gadkari, uh, brilliant, um, playwright, who died young. Gadkari said, before I die, I want to write 18 plays because I know I'm only half as good as Shakespeare. Shakespeare at 36 years. But all these names suggest something, you know, all the Gadkari, Khadilkar, these are all upper class names, these are all upper caste names, you know.
