Oftentimes life is seen as a stage. A stage in which all of us are actors exploring our own characters within our own perceptions. We are the playwrights of our own stories. Similarly, the stage itself has its own world, its own life that is created by its playwright at least foundationally. The universe of each and every play of a playwright exists within its own unity. I see plays as individual planets in the universe of the playwright, which have different kinds of moons revolving around them. These moons provide the context and the world-building elements for the play sprouted by the writer. Hence, the process of writing each play would be very varied. The process of writing a play depends on the inspiration behind the play’s world. The playwright, in her whole entirety, provides an aura to her writings that give the world of the story a soul to it. Creating instances from your own experiences and knowing what to add or remove makes the writer more aware of her surroundings and, in turn, of her writing style. I recognised my style of writing when I was given an exercise of maintaining a daily journal in the course called ‘Writing a Play’ at FLAME University, where I study. In this course, our professor, Dr Ashutosh Potdar, has helped us delve into the repertoire of theatre and drama in building our own expressions through play-writing. As a part of this course, we had the chance to meet Ms Shanta Gokhale, the wonderful writer, critic, and translator, virtually and converse with her about playwriting. The process of learning how to write a play, in general, is aiding me in being more observant of my environment and the people around me. It makes me more open to experiencing life better, especially in a digital era like ours.

Through the conversation, Ms Gokhale has let us into the world of her mind through her writing. Her words speak of the experiences that she has lived throughout the years; they come to life on stage because of her unique form of expression. As quintessential her novel Rita Welinkar is, as beautifully formulated are her two plays, Avinash (1994, Seagull Books) and Mengoubi: The Fair One (2018, Dahuli Books). While in conversation, she put forth her ideas of what theatre as a form means to her. She agrees that theatre is one of the most elastic forms of art that has been practiced. What makes it so ‘elastic’ is the spectrum throughout which theatre can exist. It can be as elaborate as possible but at the same time be extremely simplistic. “There’s a room, and one man walks across the room while another watches him. And that is theatre,” she states, quoting Peter Brook. She exclaims that for theatre to happen, there needs to be an action and a response to that action. Since theatre is a spectrum, there are endless possibilities from which it can be explored. Especially in modern times, form is not restrictive. It is mouldable. A playwright uses the form as a vessel to contain a concept in it to write a play. A form of playwriting changes according to the content of the play and vice versa. Every playwright is in a constant search for that proper vessel that is able to work well with the contents that are to be poured into it. Sometimes a new kind of form is created, and sometimes old conventions are followed. Regardless, the relationship between the play, the playwright, and its form is a special one. Unless one is writing for a specific kind of auditorium, the space in which a play is going to be presented has a lot of influence on the choices to be made as a playwright.

In my ongoing writing in our play-writing class, I have noticed that making a conceptual choice is one of the most difficult aspects of formulating a written work. Choices made regarding concept and form make a play flow the way it makes sense to the writer. The whole idea of making a choice may lead a writer to abandon another idea which could lead the play to a whole new world. But making a choice also means choosing that one idea that you, as a writer and as a thinker, really want to focus on. Taking her first play Avinash, Ms Gokhale talked about how, rather than Avinash’s character, the idea of ‘misfits’ in society inspired her to create Avinash in the first place. Society cannot cope with such ‘misfits’ because they provide a different perspective, which generally goes against the conventions. These ‘misfits’, just as the word suggests, do not fit in well with the social and cultural norms; hence, they become like a colourful blob of paint on a sheer white canvas. This blob of paint is tried to be removed from the white canvas by society, but it does not work; instead, the paint colours the canvas even more so. All in all, making society confront the so-called ‘misfit’.

What inspired and insisted Ms Gokhale to write Avinash were a few experiences with the so-called misfits, that is, mentally ill people, during her lifetime. As a 14-15-year-old girl, when she visited a friend, she heard an excruciating scream, to which her friend responded, “Oh, it’s my sister. We keep her tied down. She’s mentally retired”, and continued having her tea. The imagination of having a girl tied down and having her give out that scream haunted Ms Gokhale. “How can a girl be tied down? How could her family be so nonchalant about it?” were some questions that kept layering in Ms Gokhale’s mind as she grew up. Another experience was that of a colleague couple who talked about exorcising their daughter off an evil because she had a mental issue. Such experiences compelled her to think about where the world is leading itself to? Why are there no conversations about the mentally ill, and what can be done? Such accumulation of experiences, thoughts, imagination, and questions regarding the ‘misfit’ being of the mentally ill in society paved the way to Avinash.

Within the formulation of these experiences into the play, there came a question of how Avinash would be concluded? What was the point of the play? Initially, this was a huge question for Ms Gokhale. However, the only answer to this question was sought when she simply started writing. When there is a mass of experiences and thoughts clumped together in the brain, it is hard to make out what you want to say. That accumulation is necessary, but so is detangling it; and that disentangling of the clump of thoughts can be done simply by pouring out the mind’s world on paper. Doing this, Ms Gokhale realised that no one actually talked about the misfits of society. Now there are conversations about the mentally ill, but when the play was written, the mentally ill were not considered as people in society. They were a topic that was shrugged off and pushed under the carpet like dirt. Therefore, the point she ended up making with Avinash was her need to start a conversation.

The play never once found itself portraying the character of Avinash, but the family of Avinash and, in turn, the society they lived in. The world of Avinash was the world Ms Gokhale had lived in herself. Hence, the absence of Avinash as a character proved to be his presence on stage, within that family, and within that society. Curating such experience on stage takes many conceptual decisions that lead to what is being focused on. No one knows what Avinash looks like because he never appears on stage. Rather, everyone knows what the family thinks of Avinash. Because the physical aura of Avinash doesn’t exist for the audience, he cannot be destroyed from their minds by the mere news of his death. This whole dynamic of not having the main character on stage leaves the audience in a loop and brings out their thoughts about the theme. Avinash, hence, becomes the epitome of starting a conversation about the mentally ill in Indian society.

Compared to Avinash, Mengoubi: The Fair One is a very different play. Ms Gokhale does not even call it a play, but a “docu-drama”. Ms Gokhale calls it a docu-drama owing to the biographical nature of the Manipuri politician Irom Chanu Sharmila. The experiences related to this story were very secondary and in-direct. The tone of the play becomes firm and strength-driven because of the character of Mengoubi. The language is quite bulky, as if Irom Sharmila herself is talking to the reader. The experience of reading this play makes the reader into a character and makes Sharmila emerge into their world. Just as the character Sharmila is talking to the woman character, the dialogue makes the reader realise the world Sharmila was living in and why she is so strong.

The journey of writing this piece is quite different to Avinash as it storms out of a character rather than a social situation. Plays like Mengoubi revolve around the political situation and people’s responses to it, hence, becoming very dialogue-centred. Since Ms Gokhale had no direct connection with Irom Sharmila, she again adopted the idea of ‘absence is presence’ while enhancing Sharmila’s aura for the readers. In my reading, I noticed that Sharmila’s notion of being is completely disoriented for the readers. They do not know what kind of a woman to imagine unless they have seen her pictures, and they correlate the imagery all in their own perspectives. Therefore, each audience member would have a sense of what Sharmila would be like from the first act. Moreover, in the second act, when Sharmila does appear, she mentions that she could be anyone and that she could be acting as Sharmila. Such a bold statement in a play itself brings the audience back to the absence of Sharmila and makes them sceptical about the person standing in front of them. The idea of absence is presence works because the topic stays centred on the character even if she does not appear on stage for a while. 

There are many instances that inspired Ms Gokhale to write Mengoubi: The Fair One. These experiences again accumulated in the world of her mind and then later poured into a strong format. Firstly, the very primary experience with Sharmila that she has was an instance from an article. Sharmila came out of prison for a while, and all the women from her village who were like mothers to her, caressed her and gave her all the love, but did not offer her one bite of food because she was fasting. Sharmila’s strength was based on that support, love, and acknowledgement of her fight rather than food and water. Ms Gokhale was mesmerised reading this experience. The whole sense and sentiment that were created in this scene were brought into Mengoubi later. Secondly, watching another play about the Iron Lady of Burma became a serendipity that pushed Ms Gokhale to write Mengoubi in a certain way. The play focused on the visuals of Aung San Suu Kyi rather than her as a political figure and her strength to fight for her country. Ms Gokhale knew what not to do while writing her own play about Sharmila now. Such was the case because authenticity becomes evil to drama. After all, to find genuineness while writing a play about an actual person restricts the creative spirit. Portraying a living, a fighting woman is no easy thing. Hence, the absence of Sharmila played a huge role in the first published version of the play. Everyone knows Sharmila as the iron woman of Manipur, and everyone has heard her speak; what Ms Gokhale did was give her a voice and recognition through the eyes of storytellers and normal people. She gave Sharmila a place to simply exist in and show her impact over India in her play Mengoubi: The Fair One.

Moreover, the remoteness of Manipur as a place compelled many Indians to disregard it entirely during the time the play was written. However, for Ms Gokhale, Manipur was a living, breathing locale, to which she was quite connected because she had been there. A location builds culture and hence breeds people according to it. If it had not been for Manipur, Sharmila would never have been the woman we know her as, and Ms Gokhale would never have written Mengoubi. Even within the restriction of location, the idea of India as a whole comes in because the play focuses on a woman from Delhi finding out about Sharmila through a storyteller. The focus on stories and poetry again brings out a different flow to the form of the play and gives a whole another level to the way Sharmila is being portrayed.

The process of writing Mengoubi: The Fair One is very distributed in Ms Gokhale’s experiences. It’s almost like birds from different areas coming to the one tree in your backyard to sing during the sunset. These birds carry different voices with them but come to the same region and form a whole new experience for the listener. All these experiences, which are in-direct, come together and formulate the play. It is also notable that the first act is completely different from the second act because both were written during different periods of Sharmila’s hunger strike. However, those acts are connected by the characters and their behaviours. Act one is about people’s response to Sharmila’s fight, and act two is about her personal life and her as a person and a human being. The authenticity of her personality is something to be sceptical about, but the form the play takes and how the audience accepts the character of Sharmila becomes the main idea to think about when Ms Gokhale was writing the play.

Avinash and Mengoubi: The Fair One are two very different plays because they are inspired by different experiences and focus on a variety of notions. As Ms Gokhale becomes interested in something, she, in a way, starts knowing the thing in a very personal manner. There is a natural flow to these plays because there is a natural flow in trying to know more about an issue. In my view, a play has keys like that of a piano. There are so many keys, but all of them produce different notes; what you notice in a play and which key you press leads to the music appearing in a certain way. Each person reading the play would press a different key each time, making their music, that is, the content of the play, appear in a unique manner. Both Avinash and Mengoubi use different keys of the piano to create their own rhythm in terms of how they flow from the start till the end. Each reader notices something new and forms their own impressions, just how I am writing about them right now.

I think that a play, just like life, is constantly in flux, especially whenever it is performed. The play the playwright writes compared to the play that the director directs is quite different. It is so because the director’s perspective can change the concept completely or enhance it. A similar thing happened with Avinash when Ms Gokhale was asked to write a statement towards the end of the play by Satyadev Dubey, the director. According to her, a statement means that the character has something to say and something to claim. However, the point that Ms Gokhale originally wanted to make was that nobody knows the answer to the questions posed in the play. This concept would become utterly different while watching the play than while reading it. Therefore, the experience of reading those words and playing the play on the stage of one’s mind as you are reading it is a whole different experience. Drama, in my opinion, is in itself an art form that is interlinked with theatre but can also be viewed individually. 

Writing an experience that is to be performed in one’s mind adds to the soul of a work. Ms Gokhale’s writing does precisely that. It brings out the soul of the story through the form, dialogue, and the overall aura of the characters, all of it, which are built within the words and the stage directions that can be watched while reading. This is possible because of a certain level of clarity of expression that she has in her writing. A writer experiences, she knows, and then she writes. The climbing of these steps while writing a drama proves to be influential not only on the playwright because she writes her plays but also on the reader who later reflects on the material read. 

A play has life in it. The writer does not write characters, but she writes people. She does not write the setting of the play, but she writes living, breathing cities that are the world of those people she is writing. Our talk with Ms Gokhale made me realise that the life of a play and the life of the playwright run parallelly. These two lives run parallel because the worlds of these two entities coincide. However different they may be, one on the paper and one, in reality, they cannot be disjointed because the writer connects these two worlds together to make sense of what she wants to know. Ms Gokhale asks unseen questions in the play to know the answers to, even if there is no solution. It is the experience of trying to get an answer that makes the expedition to writing so exciting. The journey through one’s life and the journey through one’s writing are experienced together. The aura and the soul of a piece come together because the words come right out of what, and most importantly, how the writer is experiencing what she is writing. Thinking of everything we talked about during our session with Ms Gokhale, we realised how important it is to look at your life and surroundings and what you have gained or lost throughout the years to write something that flows well. I think that the way Ms Gokhale writes her plays, Avinash and Mengoubi: The Fair One, however different they may be in terms of their content, produces an interesting response from readers like us. The process of writing and the way a writer writes leaves behind an invisible but unique stamp over their works. With Avinash and Mengoubi, the themes and the content bring out a sense of being aware of what is happening around you. Rather than being fixated on your life, you should look around and feel all the experiences as genuinely as you experience your own life. As a playwright, I now believe that you should experience your life while being true to yourself and knowing what is happening all over you. That way, a playwright can curate plays better. That way, a playwright can bring life into their plays.