Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Political Theatre Today and Yesterday: A Conversation

Jagan Shah & Lalit Vachani

Filmmaker Lalit Vachani, and writer, theatre director and architect Jagan Shah have been working on distinct but related projects on Indian theatre. Lalit has made a documentary film on Jan Natya Manch (JANAM), the Delhi-based street theatre group started by the charismatic Safdar Hashmi, which today continues to actively pursue its agenda of doing meaningful political theatre. JANAM grew out of the Delhi chapter of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in the 1970s.

Jagan Shah, meanwhile, has been putting together the IPTA story—from its formation in 1943 and its heydays in the 1940s and 50s, to its slow decline over the last forty years. Jagan feels that the history of IPTA in some way mirrors the cultural history of the nation—a trajectory “from revolution to acquiescence”.

Lalit’s film, Natak Jari Hai, was released in 2005 and has been very well received. Jagan Shah has completed his documentation and is contemplating using it as the basis of a screenplay for a film on IPTA.

In the following interview Jagan Shah and Lalit Vachani discuss a range of fascinating issues to do with the documentation, portrayal and self-representation of political theatre in India.


Jagan Shah: Lalit, I’d like to start by asking how you got interested in making a film on JANAM. Also, how important did Safdar Hashmi become to the film?
The importance of the Central Assembly session is eclipsed by the Cabinet Mission deliberations and the attendance is falling steadily. Members might imitate I.P.T.A activities and make the session lively.The Hindustan Times, Saturday, April 6, 1946




Lalit Vachani: I’m going to rewind a bit. The original proposal I had written was not really just about JANAM. The film on JANAM was going to be a small part of a larger film. I was going to be doing a fair amount of archival research on IPTA and the live component of the film was going to be on JANAM. To cut a long story short, India Foundation for the Arts really felt that I had two films here. And I think they felt that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to either. Initially I was naturally a little resistant but as I got into the process of making the film on IPTA, I realized that it didn’t really work. It would be very difficult to make that film and I would probably still have been working on it today. Doing archival work on IPTA, the way you are, would have exhausted all my energy and resources.
So eventually we decided to focus on JANAM and this film came out. So I’ll address Safdar later.
But talking about your archival project, I’d like to ask—what are the nodal centres of your research?
When I spoke to Mala Hashmi [of JANAM] about the idea of researching IPTA, she said, “If you are doing something on IPTA, there is a chance that you’ll get lost. Because, which chapter do you pick up? Do you just look at the heydays of movement in the 40s and early 50s?” So was this a problem at all? What are the kinds of decisions you had to make?

Jagan: Well I think the two nodal centres were today and 1943. Certainly a lot of effort was to try and recreate the 1943-49 period. (The last successful IPTA conference was held in 1949.) And then the present is a very important nodal point because there is a need to understand in the contemporary period what the mechanisms of a political theatre are. Does it take the form of a movement? Is it most effective in the form of a movement? Or should the strategy be to create a multitude of minor, singular initiatives? And are the two in opposition at all?

I found in the study of the archive, that the IPTA story had been institutionalized through some key texts, mainly three books by Sudhi Pradhan [three volumes of The Marxist Cultural Movement in India]. But I found that that was a very limited source, because Sudhi Pradhan gives you a single snapshot of the IPTA movement seen from the perspective of one who had assumed a very  radical stance within the debate at that time and who was an extreme believer in the operative use of theatre for propaganda. The movement was made out to be a lot more revolutionary than it perhaps actually was. Whereas oral history archives like the one in the Nehru Museum, especially,

I think, the interview with Govind Vidyarthi, reveal that there was a very ad hoc nature to the so called movement. It was a lot about the Communist Party recruiting people on a daily basis almost. He mentions many cases of a radio play having to be done in the evening. So he calls up people to come and perform that radio play. So there was this whole network of local sympathisers and workers who were not all card carrying party members but who could be recruited for doing, quote-unquote, revolutionary messages. So that gave a totally different light to the material. It made the IPTA movement potentially a much more alive sort of movement. Shifting to the present, one finds that that sort of conflict between the party and the artist is still alive and still needs to be resolved. It is a big question. Does people’s theatre derive from a large, organised Sanghatan which creates people’s theatre across the country or is people’s theatre actually the obverse of that—a nonorganised, completely disseminated representation of the kind of consciousness which manifests itself in many different conflicts? Those to me are the two nodal points and that is where the conflict plays itself out.

Lalit: I was reading up on the IPTA at the time I was applying to IFA; my reading was really based on a little bit of Sudhi Pradhan and a lot of secondary sources. Now what I came across was almost a kind of a romanticisation, a valorisation. We all recognize that it was a very important era in terms of political artistic work. But I also began to think there must have been fissures. Did you come across material that showed up these fissures?
Jagan: The real point of weakness to my mind is the problem of ascription. Because it is such a loose overarching movement it tends to assume the privilege of co-opting anybody into it. That to me is a big fissure because the IPTA movement has also tried to cash in on connections that were not very strong—the Uday Shankar connection, for instance. Built into the received narrative of the IPTA is the idea that Uday Shankar, the great dancer, was somebody who espoused the IPTA cause and became one with it. But there is archival evidence to suggest that Uday Shankar did not give two hoots about the IPTA. He did perform at one large workers’ rally. It was organised by the party and it was then assumed to be an IPTA programme. The archival research, I guess, throws up many such “untruths” which are built into the telling of IPTA.
Another crisis in IPTA, to my mind, was that after a certain period, there was no new content. Whatever had been created was mainly because of Bijon Bhattacharya. Then Utpal Dutt created his revolutionary idea of theatre. And IPTA makes some claims to that as well, whereas it was a complete rebuke to the IPTA point of view. These are not necessarily fissures, but I find a lot of myths that have been created about IPTA and I think the material explodes those myths.

Post-1949, IPTA came under pressure because these cultural workers espoused an ideology which was, obviously, not the right ideology to espouse at that time. It put them outside the fold of the national structure, the Congress party’s view of things. And so post-1949 and in the 1949 conference itself—this is my interpretation—you see evidence of IPTA reaching out—wanting to create ways in which the artists could become part of the national institutional structure. They make a shift from what would be called a voice of dissent to one of oneness or cooptation with the dominant discourse.

And that moment is, to my mind, where IPTA more or less kind of loses that thread of its history. And then it is revived in the 1980s and I think that revival is entirely based on what you said earlier—sentiment. It was a completely sentimental revival—as all revivals are. But it has lacked all the elements of a revolutionary movement since its revival.

I think in your film, something you set out to do and succeed very well in doing, is portraying a little microcosm that is created as an end result of this large movement. I found that very nice and very well captured. I was curious whether the film began by looking at the character of the creator of JANAM—Safdar Hashmi, who came out of the Students’ Federation of India. Or was the idea to look at the group JANAM and its contemporary standing and to find Safdar in the middle of that? What was the trajectory for you?

Lalit: I wanted to look at Safdar in terms of some of the important historical plays of JANAM’s like
Machine and Aurat. I thought him a brilliant playwright and the use of language in these plays was really powerful. The idea initially was to just follow the making of one play from the beginning to the end—from the scripting stage to the rehearsal stage to going out and test-casing a play to coming back, perfecting it.

And this, as it turned out, was absolutely not possible because at the time we started filming JANAM, they were not rehearsing or writing a play, they were going out and performing all the time. So that, in a sense, becomes the shape of the film.

I realised that Safdar would just be much more important in the film than I’d thought—just the very nature of the tragedy of Safdar’s death and what it did to JANAM.

His spirit is so much a part of the group today. Safdar always had a problem getting people to act in the JANAM plays but after his death many more people started coming in.

JANAM came, in a sense, to the forefront and was asked to take a kind of leadership role in the people’s theatre movement. And it is in the way JANAM’s members spoke about him that Safdar’s place really became apparent.

Jagan: It seems to me that the IPTA movement has lost its steam mainly because there are no leaders of this nature—the really active, younger protagonists of the whole story. One of the rewarding things for me has been meeting some of the younger people…sort of quasi-Safdars. One in particular was someone called Tanveer Akhtar in Patna who heads the Bihar IPTA—a very interesting figure. Someone who has spent years doing what he does. It has to be granted that Safdar was unique. He created plays which were also of a certain power. But Tanveer also creates theatre out of issues which are contemporary. And he always has this message which is very much in line with a contemporary understanding of what is subversive or a theatre of dissent. That has been very rewarding for me because I feel that qua movement, a movement is as much its leader as it is its followers.

I felt that in your film the most powerful scene, the most disturbing also at some level for me, is the scene where you finally end up with Sudhanva in the space where Safdar was actually killed. And that was a very disturbing scene because you’ve brought so much emotion to that scene. You have built it up. You are walking through the streets. I had participated in the rally that came out after Safdar’s murder. I remember that day. It was quite an amazing feeling in Delhi that day. I think one brought all that to bear and then one just comes to the emptiness of this space, obviously it is not a monument. And one felt this amazing sense of isolation. I felt that on Sudhanva’s face and I could tell behind the camera that you are feeling this. How do you actually recreate this experience? It’s horror and how do we recreate that horror?

We cannot. That was where one saw the limits of the film as a medium as well. You can’t capture the horror of that man being murdered. It’s tragic. But I’m so glad you made this film because it does fill in what I felt was one of the important gaps that needed to be filled in my project.

Lalit: You have been planning to build a cinematic archive on IPTA. Tell me a little more about an archive that lends itself to the cinematic form.

Jagan: I was a freshly-trained historian when I began thinking about this project. I felt that the creation of a history of something like the IPTA, of which a major component was live action, live performance, could not take place without access to the subjective inputs of these artists.

That, for me, was the driving force in the project—to capture the emotional content of the movement.
The idea of a cinematic narrative meant that one could trace emotional links with the narrative which were not in the realm of ideology necessarily.

It is driven by this sort of visceral experience of protests, dissent and questioning of events as they unfolded. That’s why I chose the metaphor of a cinematic narrative. I did not think any of the dominant modes of writing history that I was trained in could give me access to that. An example is in the story that I heard from Shaukat Azmi, about her getting married to Kaifi Azmi and the whole romance of it. She completely presents it in this romantic mode. And I felt that obviously, if I had taken the dry historiographical stance here that kind of detail doesn’t really matter. It is of no consequence that she was in love with this poet and she asked her barrister father in Hyderabad, can I marry this poet who lives in a commune in Bombay? Which is why I felt that the story could not have been told if one were to simply retrace the events and tell what happened.

I always remember Shaukat and Kaifi in that sense. Today they are upheld as great IPTA people. But, heck, it was just romance. I don’t think it would have mattered to Shaukat that Kaifi was a communist. She was just drawn to this poet living in a commune.

I feel that just this particular dilemma between the artist and the ideologue is to me enough of a conflict to create a whole narrative around. I feel that very strongly. And it is at the heart of the whole business.

What I would like to develop is a screenplay based on this archive, although “develop a screenplay” sounds like a petri-dish kind of activity. But I would like very much for a film to be made on the subject, a feature film.

I had a question about the form you used in your film when you had these figures in the dark and then turned the spotlights on them. Why did you choose that mode?

Lalit: Well, see, the original plan was to do something with the old black and white photographs of Machine and Aurat. Then, increasingly, as I started spending time with JANAM, two things happened. First I realized that Machine and Aurat were JANAM’s most important plays, and
had been performed the most in the street theatre form. Another filmmaker, Sherna Dastoor, had already documented parts of these two plays in her film. So I reverted back to the original idea of doing something as cut points from black and white photographs of these plays.

I also felt that a play like Machine was harking back to the era of Soviet formalism—the films of Eisenstein came to mind. My cameraman Mrinal and I decided to show Machine on stage. Use the advantages of cinema, isolate the action, break up the action and cut it together. Lots of the decisions were made—we didn’t have the time to plan it— they were just made there and then. JANAM showed up having done their lines, we just blocked the stage. We never directed JANAM at any point. That is the only point in the film where we blocked them. The other interesting thing is what happens when you take a group that has been doing these plays in the street theatre form, and place them on a stage.

Interestingly, JANAM liked this stuff. I think part of the motivation was that these were both plays that had been done a lot. So it was as if they were coming from another era. So you say, okay, we’ll do it in a stylized form. It’s almost like a tribute.

Jagan: I found it interesting because you do also have street performances in the film. I particularly liked this one performance in Uttaranchal. The play finishes and you start walking with one of the spectators and you ask him what he has to say and he kind of avoids the question and he walks off. I found that very interesting.

I think something has happened to street performance. An audience which is perhaps knowledgeable
about the background to JANAM and its street work probably won’t get the same stimulation as they would by looking at what you have done—transposing it into a proscenium format. Perhaps because ultimately on film you can’t capture street performance adequately. You have to capture all of these other reactions and only then you get the full experience of it. And yet you can’t. People aren’t forthcoming with reactions.

Lalit: I think you have touched on a very important point. This is something that I was really finding very difficult to do, to capture a street play in its totality. When you are filming, it is always fragmented, you are picking up on little bits. And of course that is the nature of the video film medium, where you take fragments and you put it together. But you still can’t capture the feeling of the street theatre form because somebody is laughing behind you, somebody is reacting. You can hear some of these things and pick up that energy. But to try and film those fragments is inevitably to lose stuff.

The other thing is capturing the audience response to a play. I remember Anjum’s [Hasan of IFA] comments on the film. She said,“What do people really think about JANAM’s plays, that’s something we don’t really get an idea of. ” Sudhanva [Deshpande of JANAM] had a different kind of response. There was a feeling, at least in the beginning when they saw that first rough cut, that maybe JANAM doesn’t look so good. The response from the audience ranged from indifferent to the negative. Indifference mostly, I would say.

The most honest kind of response that I got was when something happened there and then. So if
I was able to capture laughter during a scene, then that was an honest response. The moment you
went to people after the event, everybody just came up with these clichés —“Oh yes, yes! Very good play!

There should be Hindu-Muslim harmony. Politicians should not instigate riots. ”But there was no insight about the play. I was just getting these completely canned, thought-out responses. I’m sure if we had more time we could have gone back a day later and sat quietly and got people to reflect—okay now, what did that play do for you? What are the parts of the play you understood?

What are the parts of the play you didn’t understand? Also, JANAM uses such a diverse range of components. For instance in the play Yeh Dil Maange More Guruji [on the 2002 Gujarat riots], they use text, they use pictures, the photographs of the riots. Then they use these very powerful poems. And then they use a lot of slapstick humour. Now what is the part that is working for audiences in general? Of course there are different responses. But what are the parts that are working and what are the parts that are not working? I think, if you really want to get into audience response and reaction, you will have to go more into details like this.

Jagan: I find it fascinating because the aspect of live performance is again integral to the whole IPTA story and is the most celebrated part of it—Amar Sheikh standing in front of 20,000 farmers and belting out a song without loudspeakers. This is the aura of performance, which perhaps because of the influence of television, we have lost. One almost feels that one is doing children’s theatre when one has to do political theatre in that way. It’s proselytisation of a certain kind, the feeling that you can’t defer that responsibility. You have to educate. What I got from your film was really to see those two things together in one film—the more abstract proscenium mode and the actual live street performance. I’ve got to admit that I found the abstract mode far more communicative in some strange kind of way. And I think that’s got to do with the formation of our own viewership really. I think even the street play needs to be re-invented.

And perhaps it’s got to do with what kind of consciousness one is appealing to. I think we assume that class is an issue for everyone. We assume that a struggle, for instance, is a reality for everyone. And yet perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it is a projection onto the common mass that we deal with as an audience.

Lalit: I’m going to pick up on something very interesting you just said, which is about the aura of the performance. Now talking about JANAM, I saw their photographs from the late 1970s and 1980s and
there were these incredible photographs, where there are huge audiences, masses, swarms of people, just watching. Obviously we are talking about a time that predated television as it exists now. When I talk to JANAM about it, one aspect that they talk a lot about is how difficult the State has made it to perform in spaces. So you can’t have big performances in Connaught Place, you can’t perform outside embassies, you can’t perform at the Boat Club [in Delhi] anymore. But it’s very interesting how one sees a change in a lot of JANAM’s work in the sense that the plays are now crafted to bring in a television-watching audience. For instance—this is not there in my film—but in the play Yeh Dil Maange More, Guruji the very theme song is based on a Pepsi commercial. The tune is taken from there. And they do this a lot with some of the contemporary plays. It’s sort of drawing in a television audience with a few gags. Now I’m getting back to IPTA. When you talked about the aura of street performance there were these big proscenium productions done for which huge stages were erected, and masses and masses of people came. Did you find photographs of stuff like this? There must have been oral testimonies also of people just talking about the feeling. Can you just tell me a little about that?

Jagan: There is a lot of oral testimony. But there is very little photographic information that I could get out. I found in doing the research— and I think this is a comment on our consciousness really—that there is a high level of appreciation now for the value of an image. And so increasingly I found, as I met more and more people, that they were not as forthcoming with photographic evidence as they were willing to talk. There is the aura to the photograph and there is a value to it. I found that
very interesting—the notion that a photographic image or a photographic record is something that has value and you don’t have to necessarily share it with somebody until you get a certain price. Why it mattered, of course, was that I had hoped to find a lot of photographs and make copies of them. But  people weren’t willing to let me do that.

Lalit: It’s very interesting to me that you say that you came across people who were trying to hold on to the photographs until they got a price.

Because with JANAM, they could have very well turned around and said, “Look, there is a certain set of photographs that we think are relevant that you can film and there is another set of stills. That we are absolutely not sharing with you. ” But there was just this complete openness. Despite the fact that they knew that I was not making a film for them, that I was eventually going to make my film independently. This is a group that is around and performing today and they have that much more at stake.

Jagan: They don’t. What I mean is that the larger IPTA organisation is so loose and so fragmented. There isn’t the oneness. There isn’t the identification with a single IPTA. It’s  become a banner. I mean, it’s become only a banner. And people who are part of the IPTA organisation admit that it’s a banner. Whereas I came in with the view that if it has to be IPTA, then it must have some semblance of connection with what IPTA stood for in the beginning.

Now I find it to be a sort of wishy-washy attitude. I think it’s a chapter that needs to be looked at in a certain way. Some things might need closure and other things might need to be opened up. But I think the IPTA story is certainly not over. But it’s not a story which can be told again and again in the same beaten way.
Courtesy: Art Connect, Volume 1, Number 1 July-December 2007

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