Karma Raatni: Shanta ma’am, it’s an honour to have you with us today and to everyone else present, let me introduce Shanta Gokhale. She’s a renowned writer, translator and playwright, who has been writing for over 50 years. She’s experienced in writing articles, novels, autobiographies, plays and more. So let me tell you a little about what we’re doing in our class. Our aim by the end of this course is to write a one act play of around 30 to 40 minutes. It can be any story we come up with. In order to achieve this goal, we spend time in our classes, building characters, writing their background stories, writing scenes and dialogues, which are both based on fictional characters and our day-to-day lives. We’ve done exercises in class like writing dialogues between inanimate objects and even creating dramatic scenes out of other classmates’ experiences. We discuss the essence of theatre to each individual at length, and what stands out to us in plays that we watch. Reading and watching plays in class is also an exercise we do regularly, in order to find inspirations and learnings for our own writing. We have read a few of your plays in class, Shanta ma’am, and we believe that it would be incredibly helpful to us to speak with you, and listen to your insights into the world of play writing. Before we move on, I would like to inform everyone that if you have any questions for ma’am, you can write them in the chat box, and I will read them out at the end of the session. Now, for the session itself, we have planned discussions of two plays written by Shanta ma’am, namely Avinash and Mengoubi: The Fair One. I’ll hand it over to Veni now, to start the discussion on Avinash.

Veni Khare: I think this is the first play that my group and I read of yours, and we agreed upon how much we were intrigued by it. And we’ve been very excited to speak to you about this, so I would like to introduce the play Avinash itself to whosoever has not read it. It’s a very interesting play. It’s a play about Avinash who is a character, arguably, in the play, but more than more than that, it’s about his family. It’s about the family of Avinash and how they go about dealing with his mental illness and the various manifestations of his mental illness and how that plays a role in the way the family lives its life as individuals and with each other. The characters in the play are Tatya and Durga. Tatya being the father and Durga being his wife, the mother of Avinash. Avinash has two other brothers named Prakash and Vikram. We have Vasu, who is Avinash’s wife and we have Kiran and Anuradha, who are close friends to the family, particularly to Avinash, and then lastly we have, my most favourite character, Lokhande, who’s the intrusive, overstepping, interesting, curious neighbour. So I would just like to open the floor to you and ask you about the writing process of Avinash and the character of Avinash itself. 

Shanta Gokhale: Firstly, I would like to make a general statement about theatre as a form. Theatre, I think, is one of the most elastic art forms that has been practised. At one end of the spectrum, there’s Peter Brook’s famous statement about theatre, where he says, there’s an empty space. One man walks across it, while another watches. And that is theatre. An action and a response to that action makes theatre. That’s one end of the spectrum. At the other end, you can have a cast of a 100, elaborate sets, lighting design, costume, words, movement, music, everything. Theatre can be as elaborate as that, and it can be just a single person talking or simply moving. You can imagine how many countless possibilities of making theatre there are within these two ends. All these countless possibilities have been explored. 

In the old days there were conventions. You couldn’t choose a form of theatre. Conventions bound you to a certain form, and you put your story into that form. Sometimes the form compelled you to tell your story in that particular way. It’s only in modern times that we have had the freedom to decide how we will tell our stories. Basically, form is a result of the content. You search for a vessel to hold your content, a vehicle to carry it forward. Form is no longer something that is given. It is something that you have to search for. That is the experience of every playwright who is not writing for a given audience or a particular auditorium. The space in which you are going to present your play has as much influence on your choice of form as anything else. That is why we have this division between a mainstream and an off-mainstream theatre. Or what we have grown up calling professional and parallel theatre. Choice of form is open to parallel theatre, not so much to mainstream theatre where conventions are still followed. 

Veni Khare: What was the idea behind Avinash’s character as well as the relationship that he shares with his family? What brought you to that sort of theme?

Shanta Gokhale: See, basically, it wasn’t Avinash’s character that inspired me. What inspired me to write this play was the situation in which misfits of any kind find themselves in our society. And by our society, I don’t mean only Indian society, but all over the world. Misfits are extremely difficult for society to cope with. And as you said in your introduction, it was actually the family that I was interested in because I had seen families around me taking decisions which I didn’t feel comfortable with. It’s not that I was a psychologist or I had any special knowledge, but simply as a human being. I wasn’t comfortable with how people with mental illness were being treated. I think my first experience, which I have mentioned in my introduction to the published play, was when I was at school. I had been invited over to my friend’s house and I heard this awful kind of scream — like an animal’s. The casual way in which my friend said, oh, that’s my sister, she’s mentally retarded, we keep her tied up, shocked me. My friend could go on eating her snacks and having her tea but I found I couldn’t. I was haunted by that voice and I was haunted by my imagination of a young girl, who’s been locked up. Tied up. Not given the dignity that every human being deserves. From then onwards I somehow kept noticing families of this kind. It wasn’t as if I was thinking of writing a play, but one’s experiences accumulate. They move you, your very spirit, and become questions in your mind. Over the years — I mean, when did that first thing happen? When I was 14 or 15 years old —  and some 20-25 years after that, I found that these events and instances of inhuman treatment of the mentally ill had continued to accumulate. Maybe for me, the last draw was this highly educated couple whom I knew. The woman was a colleague of mine. They had a daughter who was slow. She had some mental problem. The couple was not only highly educated, the husband was a surgeon. Despite that, they thought they should exorcise the evil that had possessed their daughter. And they did. It wasn’t something I could wrap my mind around at all. I thought if such people believe in this sort of superstition, then where are we? I think it was that scream at one end and this exorcising couple at the other end that played on my mind. I simply couldn’t rid myself of the many questions these events posed. I thought of these families and I asked myself, “What are they supposed to do? What can be done for mentally ill people?” 

Today, there are conversations around depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. There are discussions even in the mass media about these subjects, although not enough. But back then, nobody talked about these things. They were just swept under the carpet. You were not supposed to ask questions. You were not even supposed to think about these people. I think all those experiences and horrendous events accumulated to form, what could be called in nuclear    language, a ‘critical mass’. That critical mass finally stimulated me to write Avinash. Of course, the actual process of writing, the choices I made are another thing. But perhaps there’s a question, or should I continue talking about my process?

Veni Khare: No, definitely. I think you can continue because a lot of our questions are about what these family members do on their part.

Shanta Gokhale: So, what happened was, I didn’t want to create stereotypes. This was my first play and I was groping. I was groping to find out even what I wanted to say. I wasn’t sure even of that. So I simply started writing. That is actually one of the best ways of writing anything. Whether it’s a novel or a play or a short story. Thoughts have accumulated in your mind. You have mulled over them. They have almost become an obsession with you. They’re dying to get out, and you want them out. How? In what form? And finally, to what purpose? So perhaps what I wanted was really to write a play that would start a conversation. I would write a play where the audience went away thinking, “Which is the best way to deal with this?” Obviously then, I had to present three or four ways in which people could, or did deal with it. Some people go to religion. God will solve everything. Some people are superstitious like my doctor friend and his wife. They will talk about the evil eye and exorcism, things like that. Some people dismiss mental problems as madness, “He’s mad. Why are we wasting so much time on him? Forget him. Let’s get on with our lives.” Rarely, there will be someone who says, “No, there has to be some answer. We just have to look for it. And look for it beyond these given things like God – it is given that he will always do something for us; like superstition, another given that’s been practised for centuries in our society. Let’s look beyond these things and see what there is.” That is curiosity. It is an intellectual curiosity about a situation, a condition for which you are looking for an answer. It’s the looking that is important, not whether you find it or not. 

Obviously, if I had the family as protagonists, my form would have to be realistic, it would have to be based on characterisation, dialogue, and a logical sequence of events. In a play that is written in a pure realistic form — take for instance Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Wada Chirebandi or Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder – old conventions are informing the playwirght’s choices. You have a first act that forms the exposition, that is setting up the situation. The second act that gives us the conflict, confrontation. Then the third act that offers the resolution. I knew clearly that I could not, for what I wanted to do, follow this pattern, this structure. I didn’t want to be tied down to three acts or two acts. I wanted the play to flow and to take me the way it was going; not to have me impose anything on it. That’s how it was written. I wrote four scenes. I call them scenes, not acts. In that sense I wasn’t writing in the strictly realistic form. 

The second thing was: I did not want a resolution because I didn’t know what the resolution was. The whole point of writing the play was to pose questions and, you know, start a conversation. Maybe that way one could have come to some kind of resolution. But that wasn’t part of why I was writing. So, there was going to be no resolution. 

In other respects, I adhered to realism. I had to create well-etched characters. Each had to have his or her individual voice. There had to be a movement forward in the play. Without that the play would not hold interest. However, the conflict didn’t have to be one-to-one. For my play, the conflict was within each character, grappling with a single question, a single problem. Finally I was faced with the most important question. “How do I imagine Avinash? Can I imagine him?” 

I had thought of him as having a huge physique. Somehow that had come to me right at the start, perhaps because I thought a small person, a small-made person, could somehow be accommodated somewhere on the stage. He could always be sitting in a corner’’’ I don’t know… I just thought he had to be big. The bigger the problem, even in its physical aspect, the bigger the problem for the family. And yet, I will confess that I was a little scared. I didn’t think this play was ever going to be performed, but you write plays because you want them to be performed. Whether they do or not is another point. So, if this play was to be performed, I was extremely scared of what our actors would do with a ‘madman’. Unfortunately, wherever you look in theater, we notice that we have not been able to bring our actors to deal with mental illness in a realistic way. They have always over-acted, made faces and gestures and stuff like that, which is revolting. That’s not how people with mental illness are. To put such a character into the hands of an actor scared me stiff. Looking at it from all these angles, I thought absence would be presence. Just keep Avinash off the stage and he will be much more present on stage. That was a major decision for me to make. Once that was made… I mean now I can’t believe what I have said in the introduction that I wrote it in one day. But I think I did because everything by then had come together in my head. Maybe young people like you won’t appreciate how little time women with children have. There is actually no time. That is why, in all my writing, whether it’s a novel, a short story or a play, I have brought it to boiling point in my mind as I go about my work. When it comes to that point, it’s ready to go on paper. That was the process, looking back, which I appear to have followed in writing Avinash. The fact that it got staged was a fluke, really. Satyadev Dubey’s practice, normally, was to pull a script apart and reassemble it in his own way, dropping things, adding things; he reshaped the plays he did. But in this case, luckily, he didn’t touch the play. What he wanted was a long statement at the end from Vasudha and… umm …, I gave it to him. He played it that way. But what appears in the published copy is the way I wrote it because a statement means that the person who is making it knows what she is feeling, knows what she is thinking, which would have gone completely against the grain of what I was trying to do. Nobody knows, is the whole point. You have to be open to questions, you have to be open to life itself and that is how I wanted the play to end, and that’s how it is in the published copy.

Aashna Gupta: What you said about absence being presence, in terms of you know, in Avinash’s context, that is exactly what I wanted to ask you about. And that is what I found most interesting about the entire play, is that someone who never even appears on stage once is such a heavy presence throughout the play, so yeah, you’ve sort of answered that question already that I wanted to ask you why you took that creative decision. But, and also, what… how do you think the play would have sort of unfolded had Avinash been someone who does appear in the play as a separate character and as someone who has autonomy?

Shanta Gokhale: It would have been a completely different play, because if he was on stage, he would have had to have a say. In all the discussions that were going on, he would have probably lost his temper with his family because he himself didn’t know what was happening to him. People don’t know what’s happening to them, so having him there would have actually disrupted, uh, the family but, it would also have disrupted my play. If you know a large presence like that is there, I have to let him say what he wants to say. And if he doesn’t know what he wants to say, I’m not going to put words into his mouth. So where am I then as a playwright? That was one thing. The other thing which I have encountered again and again is that misfits somehow, if they’re well etched as characters and well played by actors, always overpower the characters who are seen to be normal and good. Now, if he took sympathy as he would have done … I’m sympathetic to the mentally ill and that would surely have been reflected in how I was treating him… so, if he was going to draw all the sympathy, the audience would have said, uh, you know, the family doesn’t understand, they’re fools or whatever. That meant that out of five characters, four were being dismissed and those were the four I was interested in. So, all in all, I simply, I cannot, even today with your question, in trying to think what would have happened… I don’t think I would have written the play at all.

Veni Khare: I think so many of our questions are already answered because you already told us what made you write this play, but I’ll still go ahead and, you know, do my own thinking and ask you further questions. I would like to speak about Tatya now, a character that I was very intrigued by. A character that I was very angry with and again, he’s not a character I sympathized with or anything. He is troubled, and he’s irritable and he is struggling in himself to keep up with the needs and the lives of his own children and, um, now that you mentioned he is the one that is carrying the burden, but if I had to compare him to Avinash it’s really not about him. But, he is also someone that resembles a lot of the men and a lot of the elderly men in my life. So I want- um, so first question, is Tatya inspired by the friend that you are talking about as the father and secondly, um, he’s the Patriarch of the family in this context, and a lot of the things will depend on what he has to say. So I want to ask you if there are any parts of his masculinity, or any parts of his fatherhood that you intentionally shed light upon through his behaviour and through his constant complaining, if I were to say.

Shanta Gokhale: Yeah, well, you know, unless you intend something, nothing happens. So, every character on that stage is intended to be what they are. Every character has his or her roots in personal experience. But it is never one to one. It is never, “Oh! My character is going to be like so and so”. Not at all. But, if you have met hard working men, lower middle-class men, who have done what they think is their duty by their families and the duty as laid down for the householder is to earn money so that his family gets their education, their clothes and their food… a person who is aware that he has fulfilled this duty to the best of his abilities, I think, deserves some sympathy. I am personally sympathetic to Tatya. I’m sympathetic because he is also a victim of a society which is superstitious. He is also a victim of circumstances where he had to start being a responsible adult early. He is a victim to his love for his mother, who he feels was let down by his father. He is also a victim of his society’s general contempt for women, never for the married woman, never for the mother, but for that other poor woman who lives with the father and brings up his son. She gets called a whore. She gets called all sorts of names. This is not about how one person is. Tatya is very much a representative of a huge part of our society. Huge! Even that doctor who inflicted an exorcist on his daughter. That man was sophisticated more than you can imagine: ties and suits and the best clubs in Bombay, all of that and exorcism. I have not personally known a man like Tatya, but, I live in society and I see them all around. Yet he is unique. He is single- minded in his pursuit of a cure for his son. There’s a line where he says, “it’s a question of faith.” Now, if Durga has faith in her gods and if Prakash has faith in his books. Tatya, uh, you know, has faith in something else. So, I sympathize with him, but I can understand if people are annoyed, even angry with him because he sounds like a stuck record. He can’t think beyond the single idea that he has taken hold of.

Aashna Gupta: I think, speaking of Tatya, what really, you know interested me about the characters of the play is the similarity between Vikram and Tatya. I read them to be very similar because I think they’re both, like you said, they’re both sort of very set on what they believe in and what they want to do. And they’re both sort of short tempered, which is also why I think they’re always clashing with each other. So I wanted to ask you if this is just my reading or if you also think that you know they are pretty similar in a lot of respects.

Shanta Gokhale: Oh, they are. You’re quite right, of course they are short tempered, of course, but the huge, the most major difference between them and it is partly, I think to do with generations is that his life has been lived for his family. Vikram is actually and running away from his family to make his own future, not to be blamed for it at all. He has a point. Here’s a young person who has a business plan and requires a certain amount of investment. Suddenly it’s revealed that his father has that much and he isn’t getting it, so his fury is understandable. But there is also the other part which is constantly referred to that he has a set of friends who live on the brink of crime. Tatya would never do that, Tatya totally disapproves of that. But, young men, particularly, not women, because they don’t have the freedom to wander around and hang out on the streets, no? But young men do have friends of all kinds, and if they all belong to the lower middle class, and some of them are educated without jobs, there is a huge amount of frustration. And the only way in which they can prove themselves to themselves is to get involved in crime. And many of them do just borderline crime, but it is so, and that’s equally a part of our society. Tatya didn’t have to suffer that level of frustration. This is very much a part of our post-modern, post-industrial, post-liberalisation society. So I think the comparison ends with the temperamental aspect..

Veni Khare: I would like to ask one final question in regards with Avinash. I would like to disclose the ending of the play here, which is that Avinash passes away until we reach the last scene and it is a tragedy. But in a way we saw it coming. Of course, like you know he goes missing and then we’re accusing Vikram and all of that something that. Something that I’ve been thinking about, and I brought this up with Sir as well,  that you wanted the audience to have watched the play and then you wanted them to leave with a question in their own minds, and you wanted them to answer the question on their own, “what do you do?” But my question to you is if this play had ended with… so how this play ends is that he passes away and uh we find out that Avinash’s wife is pregnant. We find out maybe there’s like a little dialogue about how that could have been the reason he finally left and we have Vikram who has a job of his own and is about to leave for Dubai anytime. It’s like as soon as he passes away, as soon as the tragedy occurs, the family falls apart like even further. I personally, while reading it just felt like they would come together finally; like as soon as someone dies they would come together. What do you think the audience would have done differently, if you had written a play in which the family actually came together, and spoke about it. What  do you think the audience would have taken with them differently?

Shanta Gokhale: OK, let me take it one by one. But this final question is not something that anyone can predict. God alone knows what audiences take away with them. They see the same play, the same show in the same auditorium. If you walk out with your ears open, you will hear  four different opinions about it. How audiences respond, you can never predict and therefore you cannot aim for it. You can never say to yourself, “If I write it this way, the audience will react in this way”. So, umm, that is off the board. You just write what flows organically from beginning to end. 

Now, let me take you back to two things. Things have been said in the course of the play, which have not been said before. Prakash finally opens his mouth in front of his father. Vikram lets his father have it and walks out. Durga has spoken about a long ago secret, which the family knew nothing about. Imagine a family which has for the first time been through this terrible time and in the course heard this sort of thing. Is it so easy for such a family to say, “Oh! that’s a relief! Now we’re on our own and it’s all love and happiness”? On the contrary, those tensions take a long time to be sorted out. The play ends on a very tense note. We don’t know what the future holds. Kiran has told Vikram, “Don’t go to Dubai. You don’t know what life is like.” Vasudha doesn’t know what her baby might grow up to be. Vikram has gone away predicting a madman’s son or daughter will be a mad person. With that kind of tension, uh, I mean even thinking back to the time of writing, this was the organic end. For me, there could have been no other end. With your question I’m thinking back and thinking no, I couldn’t have ended it any other way. But, let me just point out, in this regard, two experiences. Two couples I know, lost their children, one 10 years old, the other 18. One couple split after that and the other came even closer together. With the second couple, the man had been away from the wife, they had separated. But the death of the child brought them together. And the couple that had been together, split. You can never predict how people deal with loss. 

Now, the last point I want to make. I have left Avinash’s disappearance as an unresolved area. If you remember, Prakash says, “Yes, the dead body was found. It was unrecognizable. And there wasn’t a scrap of clothing on it.” I was working on this idea that lots of bodies that are washed ashore are bloated. There have been many cases where bodies have been wrongly claimed. Not as a case of bad faith. But, there’s no way to recognize them. Many bodies are recognized because there’s a ring on the finger or a birthmark. Families can’t recognize the person, but they recognize  the ring on the finger or a mole or something like that. Prakash says the body was bloated, unrecognizable and there was not a scrap of clothing on it. I’m afraid I am suggesting that they could have taken an easy way out. The family was unconsciously happy with the idea that Avinash had died. I didn’t want to be upfront about the idea. I wanted it to be a subtle suggestion that this too was possible that Avinash was wandering somewhere, but they weren’t keen to follow up. They’re happy to say the dead person is Avinash.

Veni Khare: That’s such an interesting thing for us to sort of leave this with. Thank you so much ma’am. I would just like- very quickly like to open the floor to the other members of my group because even they’ve been waiting to talk to you. So yeah, Sharanya? Or Karma?

Karma Raatni: So I did have one small question. So Avinash’s wife Vasu, you just said that there is a possibility that the family might have been happy at the idea of him not being there anymore so they wouldn’t have to deal with him or whatever that is. Do you think his wife also felt the same way at that time? Because I know that we have read about how she had a really bad marriage with him, but she also does start speaking about how it did get better at some point, and that’s when she got pregnant. And what do you think her feelings were at that time?

Shanta Gokhale: I lost that little bit in between. You’re still talking about Avinash?

Karma Raatni: Yes.

Shanta Gokhale: Ah OK. And you’re now talking about Vasudha?

Karma Raatni: Yes.

Shanta Gokhale: And what were her feelings? At which point?

Karma Raatni: When Avinash is- was possibly dead.

Shanta Gokhale: Aren’t they all trying to gloss over things? See, I haven’t recently read the play. You have (laughs)

Karma Raatni :(laughs)

Shanta Gokhale: My impression is that everyone is, you know, busy just glossing over the whole thing. Because the death as such comes to us via this nosy neighbour. Isn’t that right? He is the one who’s asking questions, and that’s how we get to know about what happened. Before that, it is all confusion, because Vasu is suspecting Vikram of having done away with him with the help of his friends. Vasu is a stoic person this is what you get to know about her throughout the play. She says about her marriage that she was being shown to man after man after man and being rejected. She saw that her parents thought it was their duty to get her married. So come rain, come shine, they were going to do their thing. So, if that’s the situation she was in, she might as well accept the next man who came along, and that happened to be Avinash, and she was literally thrown into the Lion’s den. She had to deal with all his problems because immediately the whole family withdrew. Now, stoicism is her second name. And it is only for those few months when she thought Avinash was coming through that they had a normal life. Only then did she allow a bit of hope to enter. But, it wasn’t long enough for her to actually rely totally on it. She had her doubts. And so, once again, her stoicism kicks in. I mean, if you imagine living with someone like Avinash. There is compassion, obviously. Sympathy, obviously, but there’s nothing for her personally there. So… her feeling is like this. “This too has happened to me. So now let me see. What this new life that is coming brings. Let me see. At least it’s a new life.” That’s more or less her statement at the end.

Veni Khare: Thank you so much. I would now like to introduce Prabha to take over the conversation.

Prabha Kulkarni: OK, so the play our group tackled was Mengoubi: The Fair One.  I’m sorry for the wrong pronunciation. Uhm so- so for those who haven’t read the play, this play focuses on the iron woman of Manipur. Her name is Irom Chanu Sharmila, so she maintained a hunger strike for 16 years to pressurize the government into getting rid of the um Armed Forces Special Powers Act. So, this play builds on the whole notion of her being on a hunger strike. And the play is really fascinating in terms of its dialogue structure, and the setting, and- and- and the themes focused on the- the political situation of the time, but also on social issues such as sexual assault or even the notion of marriage. in my reading, I thought it was a very strength driven play. Just how Sharmila as a person has been portrayed in the play and how she would be in real life. And- and in the play there are a lot of references to poems, and different poets, and small stories from all over the world, and that increases the, sort of, the tone of protest that’s brought in the whole story. So, um, there is a lot more to this play, and my summary doesn’t do it justice, so I urge you to read it. Shanta ma’am, good afternoon! Could you tell us how you formulated this and what your process was…

Shanta Gokhale: Yes. So, again, in my usual way, um, things begin to accumulate. I read a news item and go Ok accha, this is happening. I read another news item. I see a film, “Oh God! This is happening.” And so on and so forth, and I get involved, with the person or as in the case of Avinash, with the problem, the social problem. In this case a political problem. And instantly questions begin to arise in my mind and I’m looking for answers. And- the question, the kind of questions I ask are not the kind that journalists ask. So no interviews and no film or documentary will give me answers to these questions. My practice is, if I get interested in a person, and think very vaguely, maybe there is a play here, maybe one day I will make a play out of this, then I start a file, and I put cuttings into it. Whatever I can find about the character that I’m interested in, I put into this file. As I go along, I begin to get ideas. I make notes, I put those into the file and it is all on a speculation that one day maybe I will write a play. Some trigger is always there, which actually sets the playwriting in motion. For this play, the trigger was interesting. My journalist friend – she’s a very senior journalist– Kalpana Sharma used to write a column on women’s issues for The Hindu. In a column about Manipur, she mentioned something about Sharmila. In about four or five lines she described this little event that happens in Sharmila’s life, once every year. She is let go from the hospital where she is being held prisoner. The tube in her nose is removed. She’s a free woman. She can go where she likes. But, if she insists on fasting, back she comes in three days. Kalpana had described what happens during these three days and that is what gave me goose bumps. She comes out, there’s a dozen or so women sitting across the road from the hospital. They’ve set up a tent. They’re on a relay fast, supporting her from outside. When she comes out for those three days, they hold her and caress her. There’s- there’s no feeding because she is on a hunger strike. Not a drop of water, but all the love that they can give through physical touch. I found it such a moving thing and I thought “Gosh. I have to write this play.” 

Deciding to write a play was the first step. But how was once again the question. In what form? This was going to be a docu-drama. Obviously, it could not be a proper documentary because I had never met Sharmila face to face or talked to anybody connected with her. I was basing everything on various bits and pieces of information that I had collected. Then something happened, as sometimes it does, whether it’s a novel, short story or play. There is this little thing called serendipity. It’s an accident and it pushes you in a certain direction. For me, the accident was watching a play at the NCPA based on the life of the Iron Lady of Burma, Aung Suu Kyi. This play was written by a British playwright, Richard Shannon. It was an hour and a half long I think, and I sat through it thinking, “Oh no! They have destroyed her.” How I thought they had destroyed her was by casting an actor who looked like her. When you are doing this kind of theatre, you should just forget about authenticity. Just put it right out of your mind. Because what happened in this case was that the actor was costumed like Suu Kyi, she looked like her, but her voice was weak and her articulation so bad that she couldn’t stand up as the character she was playing. That became a negative stimulus for me. It told me what I should not do. What I should not do was try and, umm, create a Sharmila that the actor playing her would feel tempted to ‘be’ in a personal way. Playing her was the right thing to do; but for an actor to ‘be’ her would be wrong. That was a major decision that I took and strangely, just like Avinash, I kept Sharmila the person offstage. To bring her on stage would have meant that she would tell her own story. That would mean a single viewpoint, the protagonist’s viewpoint. That would have restricted all the questions in my mind that were driving me to write the play in the first place. I had heard her speak in a film. I had heard her speak in interviews. I would have nothing to add in terms of facts and information. So then what could I do? I did want to tell her story. But, as in Avinash, where I was interested in the family, here the society that we live in was my focus. Daily, there was news items about girls,  even men from the northeast were being ill-treated in Delhi, Bangalore, wherever they went for jobs. They were called “Chinky”, the girls were seen as ‘available’. They were seen as taking jobs away from locals. They were outsiders. And nobody, but nobody knew anything about Manipur. It was just some remote place somewhere and all these people were coming from there. I had been to Manipur. It was a living place for me. And so it was important to also talk about the larger canvas in which Sharmila was living her life. That was one thing. The second thing was, I had been completely taken up by Pebet, a play that was created by the famous Manipuri theatre director, Kanhailal and his wife Sabitri, one of finest actors to have lived in India. She played pebet. It was a brilliant play and the story had stuck in my mind. Then I thought we are storytellers. We Indians. We love telling stories, we love hearing stories. So, let me have a storyteller and accompanying musicians and let the story, whether it’s about Manipur, or about the larger issue of war, let them be like the chorus who will tell it, adding layers to the main story. That is how Sharmila and the storytellers were conceived. Ultimately, umm, I had met a lot of people, some of them close friends of mine, who showed total ignorance about the Northeast. And I thought, you know, I’d like to cast a woman like them as my protagonist, someone who really not only doesn’t know, but doesn’t want to know. Now, in any play, it is important to have development. A character who grows into something else. So you have a changing graph. Sharmila couldn’t be that person. For 16 years, as a human being, she was certainly developing through her reading, through her yoga, through her poetry, but she wasn’t going to be on stage. I saw this woman as being the one that changes. Hers became a kind of parallel response to mine. Years ago I had got interested in Sharmila. I had followed her and followed her and followed her, till it was almost as if I knew her. It was almost as if she was a friend. I had never rejected her as my woman protagonist does initially. But that’s ok. The woman wasn’t exactly me after all. Once I had the woman in place and the storytellers and Sharmila off-stage, then the story demanded being told through song, and through stories. The image that I had constantly in my mind, was Antigone. Of all the people of Thebes, many of whom objected to Creon’s idea that one brother should be given a burial, and the other brother should be left to rot outside the city gates, Antigone was the only one who spoke up. You and I know how that happens. There are lots of people today who keep mum about things that they do not agree with. If they opened their mouths, those things might stop happening. Antigone had that courage. She insisted on burying her brother. She saw iut as her duty and suffered death for it. Sharmila also sees her fight as a matter of duty. That’s why Antigone became a kind of motif in the play. 

The theatricality of a play is very important for me. The Iron Lady of Burma had bored me to tears. But stories and songs are important elements in theatre making. I wanted the play not to be a dull, plodding documentary, but a piece of theatre where there were, umm, characters, where there was dialogue and there were also stories and songs. I wrote my play. It was complete in itself. I read it to groups. They commented on it. Then Mahesh Dattani said I’ve heard about this play of yours and I’d like to do it. This was five years after I had written it and after two major events in Sharmila’s life had intervened. She had given up her fast, and she had stood for elections and lost. In that sense, the play I had written had become outdated. I discussed this with Mahesh and he said why don’t you write a second act? How could that be written? The developments were too recent. There were just a few bits and pieces of real information coming through, not sufficient or interesting enough for a second act. 

The idea for the second act came from what was reported in the press. After Sharmila gave up her fast and after she had stood for elections and lost, she was rejected, tktally abandoned by her people. She literally had no home to go to. Instead, she went back to the very hospital where she had been incarcerated for 16 years. For her as a person, this was truly tragic. Now she was not a suffering political activist but a suffering human being.My daughter Renuka, who’s as emotional as I am, put out a post on Facebook addressed to Sharmila, saying, if you want a home, my home is open to you. This gave me the idea that if someone like Renuka can invite someone living in Manipur to come and be her guest, why can’t my woman do it? My woman, who has begun to feel so close to Sharmila that at the end of Act one, she, the dutiful wife and mother, hasn’t made pakodas for her son and husband and is telling them there is nothing for them to eat with tea. Once the idea came, of Sharmila being invited by the woman, my old bug returned. How do I represent Sharmila? I still didn’t want her on stage. So, I took recourse to the possibilities that theatre offers us. Theatre is a game of pretence. It is a game where lies become truth and truth becomes lies. Let me play the game of theatre between the Woman and Sharmila I thought and let’s see what happens. That is why, in Act Two, the woman who enters as Sharmila is not Sharmila. She’s an actor playing Sharmila. The Woman says, “You aren’t!” And Sharmila says you can see me, you can touch me, you can feel me; I am me. Whether I’m Sharmila or not, what does it matter? Let’s say I’m acting Sharmila, are you willing to play along? And the Woman says yes. From there on, this person becomes Sharmila as people do in theatre and that is how the second act proceeds. Unlike Avinash, which is a tightly structured play, there is a lot of room in The Fair One for a director to play around. In fact, Mahesh edited the play down to something like an hour and a half and played it straight, no acts. He also created a chorus in addition to the storyteller making it, in a way, a different play. But the important thing was that he was sensitive to the issues in the story. He honoured all of them, so it worked as a play. That’s about it. 

Prabha Kulkarni: That was really insightful, it answered most of our questions, so we wanted to do a reading of some of the last scenes of act two, because we found that it has a lot of strong dialogues and sort of gives out the details of her life. And sort of summarizes her life in a way, in a very dramatic way, so Aparna and Ashna will be reading out some of the lines from Mengoubi: The Fair One. Aparna is playing Sharmila and Ashna is playing the woman. You can go ahead. 

Aparna Gupta: Okay Ma’am, we’re done. Prabha can take over.

Prabha Kulkarni: Yeah so, Shlok has a question that he wanted to ask.

Shlok Jain: Yeah, uh, hi ma’am. I just had one question about the way the entire play was scripted, in that there were a lot of smaller stories involved, and you know there were songs and music and there was a drummer, especially in the first time. And the second act, like you said, the actor who was playing Sharmila quite openly said, “Let’s pretend I’m an actor”, so all of these instances along with the brother as well who kind of created a bit of a distraction. It kind of made me detached from the storyline and made me focus a bit more on the topic so I just wanted to know if that was exactly your intention or was it some other reason why these elements were involved?

Shanta Gokhale: See, what goes into a play is as I said, um, the playwright answering her own questions, the playwright exploring the theme and communicating it first to herself. Now, if she is the audience, then these are points which she wants to know about. As I said earlier, one cannot predict what an audience wants to believe or is even interested in. Um, because if you begin thinking in those terms, you wouldn’t even get off the starting block. Your business is to write what’s in your mind and craft it the best way you can. In this case, in the case of this play, as I said earlier, it is not Sharmila’s story. I never intended it to be that. It is the story of Manipur. It is the story of how Manipur is seen on the plains, so to say, by the powerful. It is also about war and the futility of war. Statistics, which tell you that before the army moved in, there were 40 groups of insurgents and after they have done their bit, there are 400 groups of insurgents. So, are guns the answer? Is violence the answer? Are there other answers? The theme as I said, is much broader than Sharmila’s story. Sharmila’s story can be read anywhere. It’s a- I don’t have to tell it in full, though I have told it full. But, it’s not the story which actually has elements that will hold the audience. There’s no internal conflict. So um, the story was not really the important thing. Sharmila as an icon was. Society’s response, which she articulates was. She says for as long as I was a symbol of resistance, I was loved. The minute I stopped being that symbol, I was discarded. Now, what does that say about society? I’m looking at society. Sharmila is there. Her life has been recorded. So it wasn’t really my intention or need only to tell that story. Did I answer your question?

Shlok Jain: Yes, ma’am, yeah thank you.

Shanta Gokhale: Are you sure? Have I missed out on something?

Shlok Jain: No, no, no, thank you.

Prabha Kulkarni: Mirinalee also had a question.

Mirinalee K M: Good afternoon ma’am. So I just had a question. I think you’ve answered most parts of it, but this has been a topic of discussion in our classes as well and I thought like you know I can just ask you the question. So we can see that even in the beginning like the Woman kind of struggles with understanding Sharmila’s story because it’s so different from her own and the paths are very different as well, so how do you as a writer like you know, navigate around writing about a character whose path is very different from ours in the sense that we do not live the life, but we have to write about the life of a character and do that justice so yeah.

Shanta Gokhale: Well, it is really …  I think a writer is a writer because she, umm, ia able to engage with other lives. Otherwise, I would just write about myself. I don’t even know myself well enough. In that sense, a writer can’t be the protagonist. And if that is so, and if she’s going to write about other people, then she has to have the wish and the capacity to engage with that person and see her from within along with all the facts that she knows. In Sharmila’s case, there were lots of facts available. I didn’t have to imagine too much. It wasn’t a kind of automatic sympathy of one woman for another because that’s how wherever you are, you get treated, you’re ignored. As a condition of life, that is something many of us have endured. You just have to transfer that to the other person. But basically, if you can’t engage with other people, you can’t write. Also, when you use the pronoun ‘us’, who is us? Your experiences and mine are very different. A crowd of people is made up of individuals, so there is really no ‘us’ in the strict sense. What Sharmila is, I can find in many women around me. Women who stand up after their husbands’ death, who have never been allowed to work and suddenly take on his business and conduct it even better than he did. Where does such a woman get that strength from? It’s a question of inner reserves of people that many of us have. This is what Sharmila has. There’s not too much transference of sympathy that you need to do. Just look around yourself and you see people you can draw from.

Prabha Kulkarni: Well that was really insightful. I’m sure this is going to help us in our writing as well. I think Karma, you can take over now.

Karma Raatni: Alright, thank you so much Prabha, and now before we end this session I’m going to ask everyone if they have any other questions, everyone in this meeting. If anyone wants to ask ma’am anything. You can raise your hand. Oh yeah Sharanya, go on.

Sharanya Gopalakrishnan: Good evening ma’am. I read Avinash and there was this one point where I really started liking Durga as a character because at first when I started reading I was like Durga, is this person of another generation for me, right? So I thought she won’t be this relatable character to me. But then at this one point where they’re talking about Janaki bai, the grandfather’s second wife, she says that when everyone is calling her names, the men, especially she says, don’t call that woman names and I thought that was really, really cool of her and I just wanted to ask what was your sort of intention behind making the women characters in Avinash function differently than what is conventionally expected of them? So I just wanted to ask about the intention and how that sort of came about in the play.

Shanta Gokhale: Well, if we’re talking about conventions, Durga is actually a very conventional person, umm, and she said this about Janaki bai because a lot of women who are otherwise conventional feel a very strong bond with other women, it may not be stereotypical. I think we get our stereotypes from television shows, which are a bad thing; anyway, so we have to look at real people, who are around us, not understand human beings through what we see on television. I have grown up with all kinds of women. Among them, a lot would be very much like Durga, so it’s not intending to make her different, just making her a real person. Is she real? If she seems to be speaking out of character, she’s not real. But if she is speaking in character, she is a gentle person. She is a compassionate person and a loving person. So she is likely to have the same kind of compassion for people like Janaki Bai. It’s as simple as that.

Sharanya Gopalakrishnan: Yes, ma’am. Thank you so much.

Karma Raatni: Alright, and we have one more question. Priyanka is raising her hand.

Priyanka Gore: Yes, um, I actually wanted to ask about the initial reception that you had to the plays when you wrote them and when they first got consumed by the public because we’re obviously reading them (chuckles) quite a few years after they’ve made their debut.

Shanta Gokhale: Not so with Mengoubi: The Fair One because it was a produced just about three years ago, four years ago and it was pretty well received. I wouldn’t say that people raved about it. Lots of people had lots of problems with it; but it started a conversation. Umm, Avinash is a much more conventional play. It has drama, it has characters and people liked it a lot and then it had, umm, it was staged by Dubey in Marathi, Sunil Shanbag in Hindi, Vinod Ranganathan in Malayalam, by someone else in Kannada, then someone in Orissa did it and very recently I’ve been asked by a group, I think it’s Nashik or Pune group who want to do it. So obviously Avinash is still alive for people. It has had a good reception by and large.

Karma Raatni: OK then, so thank you so much ma’am for answering all our questions and having this discussion with us. I think it’s 4:10 now. So that brings us to the end of the session. Thank you to everyone who attended. Thank you so much for your questions and participating here. This discussion was incredibly insightful. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us again, and I’m sure this will be very, very helpful to us in our course and what we’re trying to do.

Shanta Gokhale: Thank you!

Multiple people: Thank you, ma’am.