Testing cultural boundaries

Ms Gokhale speaks of the clothing quite like her reworking of Hamlet: It is as much her own as it is Shakespeare's; she has every right to re-write it from her own perspective

This selection of writings by Shanta Gokhale contains her journalism spanning several decades, short stories, and plays. The book ends with her play Rosemary for Remembrance but encapsulates Ms Gokhale’s imagination as a creative writer and critic, and, in a sense, contains all the concerns that occupy most of the writing in this book. I will begin by placing Ms Gokhale, the playwright, at the centre, to borrow the title of one of her earlier books, The Playwright at the Centre.
 
In the play, Ophelia and Gertrude, two of the women in Hamlet, who pay for their desires, are the protagonists. The small details in the play are delightful — they eat a plate of biscuits as they discuss the men in their lives. The biscuits are a crucial reminder of the kitchen — a space that comes up often in other essays. But the biscuits are also not a full formal meal; they allow the women to have a heart-to-heart talk. Gertrude, the older one, tells Ophelia, “Men trust men. Eat your biscuit, my dear. It’ll go soft. Look at the sky.”

 
This small vignette of dialogue, in which we can almost hear the casualness of the tone, traverses the world of writing and performing in which women can talk to each other in a language that a Shakespearean tragedy can’t hold. That world needed the drama of love and betrayal, the blame for which, in almost all occasions, lies with the women characters. “You had to be the reason for your brother/ to kill my son and my son to kill your brother./ Men with quills have always made/the brave and noble kill each other for us”, Gertrude explains to Ophelia again. The entire play, which runs to 18 pages, was intended for the intimate theatre, and is a testament both to Ms Gokhale’s commitment to experimental drama and her reworking of that space towards feminisation.

 

In one of her essays, she takes a critical look at the women characters in modern Marathi plays and analyses them through an interesting term she coins — the “Nora test”. She sees if Marathi theatre has “created a woman who takes hold of her own life as Nora does” (Nora, a character in Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, is one of the most iconic female protagonists in modern drama). It hasn’t, she argues. Ms Gokhale rewrites and engages with the classics with a keen eye for the place of women in these texts, be it Shakespeare or Ibsen. She can, however, do that equally well talking about the maxi, writing about it in Marathi.

 
In “Maxi-mum Story”, she writes of the maxi as a new moment in Indian fashion, but, unlike fashion, which changes with the season, she tries to understand why it has endured. The maxi’s utility for the working woman, she says, is invaluable and so it has stayed. “Most importantly,” she says in conclusion, “wherever it came from, it is now as much ours as a play on the Kamani Auditorium stage, a Marathi novel or a modern painting. And so wherever it shows up, it has every right to be there.”
 
She speaks of the clothing quite like her reworking of Hamlet: It is as much her own as it is Shakespeare’s; she has every right to re-write it from her own perspective. With the maxi, however, she’ll have to do it collectively with other women. The use of “us” shows that she is also aware of her readership. The article was first published in Marathi, which means a wider readership than her English play and essay that I have discussed so far. The right for women to claim what they think is their own is explained through a shared cultural object to which most of her readers can relate.

 
From this minute, private understanding of a shared culture, Ms Gokhale also takes us to the larger public implications of culture, especially for politics. This finds its best exposition in the sections, “On This Grand Nation” and “On Marathi Culture”. The context for many of these questions comes from the rising politicisation of Marathi culture in Maharashtra. Added to this is Ms Gokhale’s own love for the language and its history most evident in her essay on the 19-year-old Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni, who wrote a commentary on the Gita in Marathi centuries before the language became a site for the kind of politics in which the Shiv Sena engages. Writing about kisses as a form of public greeting and the kind of unfavourable responses it generates, she uses a curious phrase — “culture cannot hold”. It’s an incomplete phrase taken out of context here, but if we probe a little deeper we understand a lot of things about ourselves. Can the culture of Marathi theatre hold a Nora? Can the Marathi manoos [man] hold workers from other states in India? If not, why? Ms Gokhale’s search comes from this impulse.

 
The translations from the Marathi in this book are either by Ms Gokhale herself or by Jerry Pinto. If Ms Gokhale was one of the first to translate and unlock the door to Marathi literature, Mr Pinto, in translating and editing crucial books, has left it wide open. This is one book that must be read if anyone wishes to enter that world.


The Engaged Observer: The Selected Writings of Shanta Gokhale
Edited with an Introduction by Jerry Pinto
Speaking Tiger; Pages 282, Rs 499


 

The reviewer tweets at @souradeeproy19