Two Winners And A Photo Finish
According to the INDIA TODAY-ORG-MARG opinion poll, there will be clear winners in two states, but a tight finish in a third.

The Last Rampage
To offset
J. Jayalalitha's slight edge, a pugnacious M. Karunanidhi gives it his all in what is his final electoral campaign.

The Sixth Sense
A mercurial Mamata Banerjee vs a dependable Buddhadev Bhattacharya. The mismatch leaves the Left Front with a premonition of victory.

Secular Stake
Even as the Church makes a blatant move to play a more political role in the state, the CPI(M) nominates a priest to woo minorities.

One Man Barmy
India's apex social sciences facilitating body is rocked by civil war: the chairman says he is being opposed by both RSS ideologues and leftist academics.

Changing Order
An ageing profile and a frustrated officer corps leads the force to consider VRS and restructuring.

Liquid Asset
The Rs 700-crore industry has attracted many players. Now, purity will decide who stays in business.

Board Of No Control
Tax authorities say the BCCI spends more money on meetings than on matches.

THE ARTS: THEATRE

The Story Of Us

A growing crop of English theatre directors in India is looking inwards for inspiration and scripts

By Anna M.M. Vetticad

There's hope yet for english theatre in India. The Raj of Borrowed Scripts might one day come to an end. "For a long time, English plays here were done by a class-conscious lot," says playwright Mahesh Dattani acidly. "For them, English had to be spoken as close as possible to the way the white man does. There was a complicity between them and their limited elitist audience because performing and watching such theatre enhanced that feeling of being a class apart." The wannabe-whites have not disappeared, but at least they're not the only ones around. An increasing number of directors working with English plays today find that it's not just Jack and Jill, but Jagdish and Uma that their audience wants to see. Rest your minds. The classics are not out: the 400-year-old craze for Shakespeare hasn't died down overnight. But simply performing a contemporary western play verbatim on the Indian stage is slowly becoming passe. At least for some directors, "adaptation" has moved beyond just changing names of characters from recent Broadway/West End hits, throwing in a Hindi sentence here or a swear word there.

So with Going Solo 2, a set of one-act plays recently presented in Mumbai, Delhi and Pune, directors Anahita Uberoi, Vikram Kapadia and Rahul da Cunha had the Zafars and Darshans of the country delivering monologues about road rage, rape and marital discontent that are top-of-the-mind for the Indian city-dweller. GS2 was adapted from western works with a couple of originals by Kapadia. Know why it worked? Think of a producer called Rocky Shivdasani (da Cunha's piece, inspired by Brian Friel) strutting around on stage listing his films: "the children's action film ... Chhota Chetan, Chhota Rajan", "the great romantic saga ... Aap Aaye to Bahaar Aayee, Varna to Main Andar thi". Now you know why.

It's more fun this way-to watch a play with references to Chowpatty, G.B. Road or Connaught Place, instead of Manhattan, Soho or Champs-Elysees. So now a small but significant crop of directors is no longer confining itself to classics or contemporary hits. They are opting for drastic adaptations. Or searching for original Indian-English scripts. "It's demeaning to carry on this pretence that we're working on universal plays. They're all specific to a cultural and geographical context," says Bangalore's Prakash Belawadi. "So apart from the classics or a contemporary play with a relevance to India, I wouldn't touch a western play any more."

That's a hard choice to make in a country with few English playwrights. The Indian Novel may have firmly taken root in literary soil, but The Indian Play is yet to arrive. It's tough enough to write something that will ultimately be judged by how it works on stage and not on page. Add to that the unwillingness of sponsors, even directors, to back new playwrights when there are safe foreign options, and you know why the floodgates are not bursting. But what was earlier a trickle with the likes of Gurcharan Das and Dina Mehta is gradually swelling. Dattani and Manjula Padmanabhan are leading lights of the new generation. Children's writer Poile Sengupta of Bangalore took to full-length adult plays only in the mid-90s. With seven already behind her, she's now writing one on literacy and another called Thus Spake Shurpanakha, So Said Shakuni. Da Cunha and Kapadia are both writing full-length plays. And Delhi's Sunny Singh is working on her second play, Missing, which is about the family of an Indian soldier 30 years after he disappeared in the Bangladesh war.

These are people who have evolved their own idiom; who write not just Hinglish, but Indlish; who are not granting reluctant concessions to Indianness. "The earlier generation might tend to write the way most Indians wouldn't speak," says Singh, "but mine writes the way we ourselves speak the language." It's still not a cakewalk. Why risk a Dina Mehta when you could have a tried-and-tested-in-the-West Harold Pinter? Mehta, 72, recalls two occasions when she won a Sultan Padamsee Prize for Play Writing in English: "Both times I wrote to Alyque Padamsee offering to return the cash prize if he'd give me a modest production, but he did not." While Padamsee's response is, "I only direct plays that set me on fire", Mehta adds, "Well-heeled directors are still reluctant to take on original English works by Indians. Rahul da Cunha will talk about the need for such plays, but next thing you know, he's announcing some big adaptation."

Director Roysten Abel sees the trend as an acknowledgement of the reality that "we live in a multilingual, multicultural society". His calling card is the award-winning English-Assamese Othello, A Play in Black and White where he cheekily turned the Bard's work on its head. This Othello is about the politics in a theatre group where a dark-skinned Assamese entrant is cast as Othello, a role coveted by a fair-skinned senior member of the troupe. Abel followed that up with last year's English-Hindi Goodbye Desdemona, about two actors doing their version of Romeo and Juliet-with two men in the lead. "The language works when the milieu is right," he avers. "So to make an Indian maidservant speak English, for instance, doesn't work."

What also doesn't work is the still stilted English in some scripts. Sunny Singh's Birthing Athena may be a moving saga of a mother-daughter relationship, but which Indian, even if a writer, would charge her artist mother with ambitions of "birthing Athena"? Meaning (Singh's words): "Wanting to make her child her perfect creation." Adaptations don't always work either, as Mumbai's Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal points out. It does with her latest directorial venture Once I Was Young ... Now I'm Wonderful!-five one-act plays by Alan Bennet, Jane Wagner and Robert Anderson-because "the themes are universal". So it doesn't jar when Violet of the original becomes Violet Gonsalves in an Indian old-people's home; when the all-Brit Graham Whittaker becomes Gustaad Vachcha, a 50-year-old Parsi man living with his 72-year-old mother in Mumbai. Not that anyone hates Graham. But Gustaad ... he's one of us.

MetroScape

Bond Free
The Savoy in Mussoorie must be the only hotel, apart from the Raffles in Singapore, to have a thing about writers. So, it was quite kismet when publisher Pramod Kapoor of Roli Books and author Namita Gokhale, who has an imprint with him, hosted the Ruskin Bond Festschrift—a Writers' Retreat in honour of that gentle Indian Roald Dahl, Ruskin Bond.
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Looking Glass

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