Three years ago, Milind Inamdar came across ND Mahanor’s poetic work Ajintha. A love story of a white man with a Bhilla woman set around the Ajanta caves, the poetry took the shape of a play in Inamdar’s mind, but executing it took him long enough. This year, the National School of Drama graduate opened the play at a festival in Odisha.
“Five thousand-odd people there didn’t understand the language, but they understood the play,” says Inamdar whose play could well be multilingual as it spans across three languages -- Marathi, English and Ahirani, which is the Marathi dialect in the Aurangabad region.
Mahanor’s Ajintha tells a partly-fictional love story of Robert Gill, an engineer with the East India Company who was devoted to the task of recreating the art in the caves. While Gill is consumed by the passion of recreating the stunning murals (they were mistakenly considered frescoes according to a friend who is an art historian), Paroo, a local Bhill woman, comes by as muse and solution to his painters’ block.
The tale of the two lovers who don’t even share a common language uses selected paintings from the 29 “Ajintha lenis” to create a semblance of a tragic love story, with a hint of feministic approach and a hint of poetic approach.
One admires the fact that a woman like Paroo, who doesn’t understand Gill’s alien language, pats bhakris in response to his beat of the drum. With folk music, dances and Mahanor’s poems woven into songs, the experimental play should promise to be a rich experience. However, it is a slightly diluted experience. The plot maybe meaty enough for a poetic work, however, it doesn’t offer much for a full-length play.
The poetic license goes too far as Akshar Kothari’s Robert Gill delivers bookish English dialogue and a few melodramatic outbursts. That said, the director could have taken the easy way out by keeping the play unilingual but the English, the Ahirani lends an authenticity to the tale. Pallavi Wagh’s portrayal of Paroo is mind-blowing. In the opening dance sequence, as she dances among the other female characters, her body language tells you she is the leading lady. With very little dialogue, Wagh manages to express the playful innocence, exhilaration, fear and anger that define Paroo.
Ajintha is grand for an experimental play but too different to be a commercial play. The play has its kinks but it does a decent job of bridging a very thin but a pertinent gap between literature and theatre. And even though the play has had all of five shows through the last year, the Mumbai show, saw a scantily occupied auditorium. However, the director is optimistic about offering good content irrespective of commercial viability and is enthusiastic about his next project which is also based on a literary work. For that enthusiasm, he deserves credit.
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