For more than four decades, theatre producer and director Sunil Shanbag has embraced the formal performance space and worked beyond it. He has grappled with ideas critical to our time through text and performance. He has involved the larger community in exploring the political terrain of theatre, and its possibilities for a country as diverse as India.
Just a few examples: Sex, Morality, and Censorship, written by Shanta Gokhale and Irawati Karnik, dealt with the censorship of Vijay Tendulkar’s play Sakharam Binder in 1972. “As a director,” says Sunil, “I was very aware that we were constructing an argument about censorship of a play in the context of its times.” Loretta, a musical in the Konkani form known as Tiatr, spoke of identity by probing parochialism as well as linguistic “purity” and hybridity, “at a time when we were being asked to prove our ‘Indian-ness’ by the rapidly growing ranks of right-wing bhakts.” Ramu Ramanathan’s play Cotton 56, Polyester 84 told the story of the textile mill workers of Mumbai. The play was based on interviews with mill workers and their families, as well as the history of the confrontation between textile trade unions and mill owners. The play, “brought to light the suppressed history, subculture and marginalisation of the mill workers of Mumbai, whose plight was largely ignored in the raging public debate on the development of the mill lands.”
The choice of text and, of course, the performative mode, says a great deal about Sunil’s theatre. On the one hand, his work looks at authoritarianism, censorship (including self-censorship), and the tyranny of “morality”, squarely in the eye. On the other, his work struggles to define and map cultural resistance – dissent. Indeed dissent is the idea, the metaphor, the object of the quest, in a play such as Words Have Been Uttered. This is how the play unfolds: eight actors and a musician sit with papers and books and musical instruments onstage. They read, recite, sing or perform texts that may be poetic or satirical, and that may be in different languages or from different cultures. What all the texts do is probe, highlight nuance and, above all, question. From caste, gender, religion and superstition to majoritarianism and notions of nationalism – everything that bears upon the world we live in is liable to this performative process of unravelling.
We are not activists, so are we psychologically and otherwise prepared for this kind of eventuality?
On the other hand, today more than ever before, the need for alternative narratives is critical.
Why do artists have an added responsibility? Can art provide the nuances that journalism cannot? Even the best of journalism? Can art resist the numbing influence of the mainstream? We believe the answer to both is yes.
In August 2022, Sunil spoke to me about the nature of politically engaged theatre practice in India – the many risks it must take, and how its interaction with a live audience has been disrupted by the vetoes of the state, social morality and mob censorship. In recent years, says Sunil, the ruling party, its ideology, (and lately, COVID), have imposed new restrictions on live performance and collective engagement. The challenge theatre faces, he says, is figuring out how to keep alive the spirit of dissent. And indeed, this is a challenge for the entire cultural community …
Githa Hariharan (GH): I think we agree that our artistic practice is political, but in all sorts of complicated ways that are not always obvious. What is your take on this truism that all of us experience, but also relearn every day?
Sunil Shanbag (SS): I think what has happened is that the definition of what constitutes the political has widened considerably in the last fifteen years. The earlier understanding of politics in the arts was restricted to what was obvious at the time, for instance, the relationship between the individual and the state, or with the institutions of state power. I remember someone expressing disappointment about a play I did, which, among other things, looked at the cultural politics of music-making in the Indian tradition, and I was told that it lacked the “politics” of my earlier plays. Again, in another instance, a play that looked at identity and language was not accepted as being political. People still construct and find comfort in categories, and that’s a disappointment.
I think it also has to do with the growing anti-intellectual environment in the country, supported so aggressively by mainstream art – whether it is cinema or music, or even theatre – which then brings us to how radically political it is today to create and nurture safe spaces for ideas and the intellect. Spaces where there can be reflection, thoughtfulness, respect for different ideas, and discussion and debate without the terror of being shouted down, even attacked physically. I believe we have slid backwards in these times. I remember, not long ago, our aim was to occupy a part of the mainstream space in theatre with our idea of theatre. In the present circumstances, that seems almost impossible – foolhardy even. So, you’re right … it is a process of continuous learning and relearning.
GH: Theatre and film are among the most powerful forms to communicate with the audience, not just as individuals but as a community. Theatre, arguably, is even more direct, with the actors and their bodies present before the audience. What advantages does this give your performance as a political act? What challenges?
SS: Undoubtedly theatre has that power to provoke, to subvert. There is a certain charged atmosphere during a live performance, in that anything can happen. It’s something happening in the moment, and that’s a very special quality. Which is why the pre-censorship of live performance, to which we’re still subjected in Maharashtra, is absurd.
The subversive quality of live performance makes people wary and it often makes them over-react. But I want to use this observation to present another view, questioning something that we assume, take for granted, often to our own detriment.
One of the important debates that the COVID period threw up was about what constitutes “live-ness”. This debate was sparked when live performers, like theatre-makers, had to go digital and found themselves having to perform to an imagined audience, and within a pre-fixed visual frame (usually provided by Zoom). Very discomfiting, as you can imagine. There was a strong purist position that theatre performed in the digital domain was not theatre at all. There was also the counterview; we saw how quickly so many theatre-makers in India found all kinds of innovative ways to deal with the challenge of not being live. However, what was disappointing was the lost opportunity to re-look at the whole idea of live-ness. A lot of live theatre is in fact “dead” theatre, or “deadly” theatre as Peter Brook put it. Theatre that just does not work, does nothing for anyone. And yet it is played live. So, what is live-ness? And do we work hard enough to make it happen? This is a problem, especially when theatre is being done for a larger idea – for instance, in activist theatre.
GH: I have spoken of the community – but of course, the “accidental community” of an audience in a theatre hall is quite different from the neighbourhood community. Do you feel street theatre or the adaptation of “traditional”/ “folk” forms have greater potential as “people’s theatre”?
SS: There are two distinct ideas in the question but they are connected. I think different spaces allow for different possibilities in communication. The kind of communication possible in an enclosed space, and further, in a space designed for performance, might be very difficult “out on the street” and vice versa. There is also a difference of accessibility to the two kinds of space. The street is more democratic – anyone can be there. But it also means that there is a shifting audience and varying degrees of commitment to the performance. When we were performing Cotton 56, Polyester 84,221 in our eagerness to perform for worker audiences, we offered to work in small community centres or even out in the open. But the workers very firmly let us know that they preferred to see it in a formal auditorium because they would enjoy that experience!
I think when we speak about street theatre, or the adaptation of folk forms as being suitable for “people’s theatre”, perhaps what we are referring to, apart from what the plays are about, are some of the special theatrical qualities these forms have. I have always loved and played with some of these theatrical elements in my own “formal” work. For instance, the possibility of breaking the conventional “fourth wall”, and including the audience in the performance; the possibility of moving back and forth in time and space; and the possibility of using different language registers.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Words Have Been Spoken’ by Sunil Shanbag in This Too Is India: Conversations on Diversity and Dissent, edited by Githa Hariharan, Westland.