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| Sadanand Menon: A theatre that taught without schooling | |
| Sadanand Menon / New Delhi June 12, 2009, 0:33 IST | |
 Theatre artist and political activist Habib Tanvir remained relevant till his last breath. It is interesting Habib saab departed on June 8, even as his group was in the midst of planning activities to celebrate 50 years of Naya Theatre, the energetic company of actors and musicians he set up in 1959 with his wife Moneeka Mishra. Moneeka departed in 2005 – soon after the wonderful tribute paid them by the Prithvi Theatre Festival when a bunch of their plays were presented and enough resources raised to fund a revival of the immensely influential 1954 play ‘Agra Bazaar’.
What might happen now to the group is anyone’s guess, as their talented daughter Nageen struggles to retain its inventory and its inspiration. Luckily, much of their songs and compositions have by now been recorded and stored in the digital mode. A few documentary films too have been canned. However, landmark productions in their radical repertoire like Agra Bazaar, Charandas Chor, Moteram ka Satyagrah, Lala Shohrat Rai, Zahreeli Hawa, Ponga Pandit, etc. might simply wind up as the group of rural and urban performers scatters and disperses.
Habib himself has left having completed only the first part of his autobiography Matmaili Chadariya (Soiled Blanket). With the kind of packed and embattled life he led, two more parts were in the pipeline. It is a moot point if they would get written up later by someone else, based on his notes and diaries. As I sat opposite him a month-and-half ago in his flat in Bhopal, Habib, hoarse and just out of hospital, yet looking dapper in a new moustache and goatee, confirmed he had completed the section on Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in his autobiography. That perhaps brings the narrative to the late 1950s. However, most of his major contributions as a playwright and director come after that.
Decades ago, he regaled some of us in Chennai on how he came to work with the folk and tribal performers of Chhattisgarh and the manner in which he himself slowly got converted to their adaptive and integrative style. It led him to abandon the didactic style of IPTA and the academic style of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) where he trained, and consciously go to a theatre of the roots where the emphasis was on a loose, flexible and malleable style, free of theatrical devices of the proscenium like ‘blocking’, ‘plotting’, etc. The result was a body of performances that rippled with spontaneity and could be instantly rigged up at any conceivable venue — from fields and factories to schools, railway stations and public squares, relying entirely on the suppleness of the script and the improvisational strategies of the performers. He yoked this successfully to Chhattisgarhi folk dances like Naacha and Rai and musical narratives like the Pandavani. Habib also learnt to move away from academic scripts to a kind of folk-inspired, metaphoric plays that conveyed sharp political messages through allegory and suggestion rather than the direct flag-waving agitprop, so common to ‘political’ theatre.
Habib once explained to me that no one likes to be ‘caught being taught’. He described an incident when he called on a friend and found the man trying to teach his reluctant four-year-old how to count. The kid was kicking and screaming and wouldn’t cooperate. Habib scolded his friend for his backward idea of ‘teaching’ and grabbed the child away, telling the friend he’d handle the situation. He strolled about a bit until the child fell quiet and slowly pointed out the tiled roof to the kid saying, “See, beta, how many beams are up there! One, two, three…?” The child looked him straight in the eye and exclaimed, “Uncle, I can see; you are trying to teach me!”
This experience, he claimed, was a great learning and he decided to abandon the didactic route in art as explored by early Leftist theatre and work through allusion, suggestion and inference, enabling audiences to enjoy as well as draw their own political conclusions. It led to the creation of a theatre without schooling. Of course, this was also the influence of the time he spent at the Berliner Ensemble in Germany, where he was hugely influenced by the methods of the Epic Theatre as developed by Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s focus was the working class. Habib decided to focus primarily on the consciousness of the emerging Indian middle class, in order to make them “allies in a future revolution”.
Habib saab will be remembered for fashioning a direct, non-sophisticated theatrical form which was, nevertheless, high on artistic, musical and political content. Both fearless and sensuous, he delivered contemporary Indian drama of its aesthetic pretences and juggled up a form that spoke straight to the heart. One could echo after Asghar Wajahat’s paean to Lahore, “Jisne Habib nahin dekhya, woh janmaya hi nahin” (He who has not seen Habib has wasted his life).
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