Three Plays

Gurcharan Das

Description

Three extraordinary plays by Gurcharan Das with a new introduction by the authorThe prize-winning Larins Sahib is a historical play set in the 1840s—a confused period after the death of Ranjit Singh when the British first arrived in the Punjab. Mira, ‘a rite of Krishna for five actor-dancers’, explores what it means for a human being to become a saint through the story of Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajput princess–poet. 9 Jakhoo Hill, the third play in this volume, is set in the autumn of 1962 in Simla. It examines a number of themes—the changing social order with the rise of a new middle class (while the old class foolishly clings on to spent dreams), the hold of Indian mothers on their sons and the eventual betrayal of sexual love.This trio of unusual plays, written by Gurcharan Das when he was in his twenties, will interest both general readers and theatre buffs.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
• Date de parution: 08 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184756258
• Langue: English

Extrait

GURCHARAN DAS
Three Plays
LARINS SAHIB MIRA 9 JAKHOO HILL
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
Larins Sahib
Mira
9 Jakhoo Hill
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
Three Plays
Gurcharan Das is a well-known novelist, playwright and public intellectual. He is a columnist for the Times of India , and other papers. He is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good , India Unbound , A Fine Family and The Elephant Paradigm .
Praise for the Plays
Remarkable in the way it combines Indian legend with the sophistication of Western total theatre Mira has something of the quality of a dream ritual. [She] is a modern woman being broken on the wheels of convention It has all the grace of a lovely voice speaking of eternals in a language just delicately opaque
-Clive Barnes, New York Times
One can see why Larins Sahib won the Sultan Padamsee Prize beautifully structured, with simplicity, carving out the development of one man s character. The dialogue is lucid and dramatic like a delicate instrument in a surgeon s hand. We feel the ineffable thrill of tragedy
- Enact
During the autumn of discontent of a once-wealthy clan [ 9 Jakhoo Hill ] broods over better days on the hold that mothers have over their sons, a family coming down in the world remnants of the Raj, disillusionment with politics. Sixties? The script is here and now
- India Today
But by all that is noble and true [ Mira ] is an artistic achievement of immense merit and supreme significance to the re-blossoming of the theatre in India A rare, beautiful experience, watching and listening to Mira ; one came out of the theatre cleaner, more joyous, and several centimetres taller
- Times of India
This prize-winning play [ Larins Sahib ] has solid dramatic substance
-Nissim Ezekiel, Times of India
For Meera Barkat Ram
Introduction
I wrote three plays in my twenties. Each one is set in India at a different time and employs a distinct genre. Larins Sahib , a historical play, is set in the confused period after the death of Ranjit Singh when the British first arrived in the Punjab in the 1840s. Through a human drama of hubris that eventually brings about the hero s downfall, this play describes the early relationships of the English with Indians. Mira , first produced as a rock musical in New York, explores what it means to become a saint through the story of Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajput princess-poet. 9 Jakhoo Hill , the third play in this volume, is a realistic family drama, set in the sad autumn of 1962 in Simla when the Chinese invaded India. It is about the changing social order with the rise of a new middle class and hence even more relevant to the India of the early twenty-first century.
Writing a play takes a certain amount of wild audacity which I lack today. In my twenties, though, I had the madness of youth when everything was possible. When I sat down to write Larins Sahib at twenty-two, I thought to myself that Shakespeare too must have sat down on one such day to write Hamlet . Now a person who has his wits about him does not compare himself to Shakespeare, even in his dreams, but this is precisely the kind of reckless lunacy you need to get started on an impossible project.
I have since realized that writing a play is much more difficult than any other form of writing. Theatre audiences are critical. One false note and you are done for. Readers of books, I think, are far more sympathetic. To write for the theatre you have to know the theatre. Ideally, you should have been an actor or a director, at least for a while, or hang around the theatre a lot. To publish a book you don t have to know about publishing and printing in the same way. For a person of the theatre, performance is the thing. On the stage it is always here and now. A novel, on the other hand, is about what happened, and the writer s reassuring voice is always there, narrating what happened. A play is not on paper. It is there to share with actors, directors, set designers, electricians and music makers.
It is the business of theatre to entertain people. Nothing needs less justification than successful entertainment. People pay hard-earned money to buy a ticket, and they must be given pleasure. Aristotle demanded that even tragedy should first entertain. The problem for a writer is that theatre is so utterly dependent upon stage production and the intervention of the actor. My plays keep getting performed sporadically and I sometimes go and see a production. Invariably, I get the feeling that it is someone else s play. Once written, I suppose it is . It belongs to those performing it or watching it. I stay away from the stage because I am not a theatre person . I am uncomfortable with theatre people and actors, some of whom are on stage all the time.
After these three plays, I wrote a novel, A Fine Family , and I learned a great deal about the difference between the two genres. A novel is generally written in the past tense. It is the past reported in the present. In drama, it is always now. This gives theatre an energy and vitality, which the novelist longs for in his work. A play is what happens. A novel is what one person tells us about what happened. In the end, I think there are probably more similarities than differences between novels and plays because both interpret life. Life as it appears to us in our daily experience is an unintelligible chaos of happenings. As it is occurring, life is senseless. Both novelists and playwrights pick out significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant. Time is an important ally in this. Henri Bergson once said that the great advantage of time is that it prevents everything from happening at once.
If I had to go back and write these plays all over again, I would have insisted on working with a group of actors as soon as I had the first draft of the play. I would have given lots of room to actors to improvise and I would have trained myself to be receptive to what was working on the stage and what was not. I would have learned to listen and to see what an audience does and a writer does not. I would have learned to be humble and learn from the actors and their improvisational exercises. I realize it is a different kind of work for a writer to write in this manner when he is so used to working alone, but it cannot be helped. The test of a play is how it works on the stage and not how it reads.
But I get ahead of myself. Let me go back to the beginning. I shall first describe how I learned to write, why I became a writer in English, what sort of language English is evolving into in India, and why it is important to use that language in the theatre in order to connect with Indian audiences. Then I shall come back to the three plays.
Growing Up to Write
I grew up in a middle-class Indian family that could afford to give me an education. This enabled me to write and speak in English and exposed me to Western liberal ideas. And so, I found myself in a situation of privilege on the Indian subcontinent. As I grew older I felt it a duty to capture my experiences and articulate them as honestly as I could. My mother taught me that one s life is earned, earned against formidable odds, and one must somehow try to make some sort of sense out of it. Writing, I have discovered, is one way to do it.
I was the eldest son of an engineer who worked for the government in the Punjab. Our family budget was always tight and after paying for school fees and milk, there was little left to run the house. My mother told us stories from the Mahabharata and encouraged in us the virtues of thrift, honesty, and responsibility. We lived in the innocence of the Nehru age when we still had strong ideals. We believed in socialism, democracy and the United Nations. We were filled with the excitement of building a nation. Even though the dream soured, Nehru s idealism left a permanent mark on us.
I went to America as a schoolboy for a few years in the 1950s. In my high school I was surprised that we had to attend a class called shop , which was filled with lathes, tools, and machines, and we learned to work with our hands. We learned to repair a window, make a table or unclog a sink. At the end of the year, we had lost our fear of technology. We had also understood Bronowski s dictum that the world is understood through the hand, not the mind- The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Hence, many Americans become tinkerers . This is a powerful idea for India where we have traditionally had contempt for manual labour. Tinkerers combine knowledge with manual labour, and thus you get innovation. A lack of tinkering may be one of the reasons we have failed to create an industrial revolution in India.
After completing high school I was lucky to get a scholarship to Harvard University. Because American colleges are liberal, I was allowed to experiment with many subjects, and I had the unbelievable luxury of studying Sanskrit with Daniel Ingalls. I took full advantage of this liberality and took courses in economics, history, literature, and even architecture (because I was fascinated with buildings). Eventually I majored in philosophy and wrote my thesis under the moral and political philosopher John Rawls.
On the day that I graduated from Harvard I knew I would write. I was expected to go on to do a PhD in philosophy (at Oxford) but I chickened out at the last minute. As I lay on the grass one afternoon that summer, I asked myself if I really wanted to spend the rest of my life living in that rarefied stratosphere of abstract thought. I had also begun to feel that the academic life was stuffy and confining. So, I came back home to India instead and, until I could figure out what I wanted to do with my life, joined a company in Bombay which made Vicks Vaporub (and was later acquired by Procter & Gamble). The chief virtue of my job was