Theatre does have a future in India: Girish Karnad

He is a multifaceted and composite culture maven: playwright, film actor, scriptwriter and producer. He has received several major awards— Padmashri, Padma Bhushan, the Jnanpith and the Sahitya Academi Awards and has been the director of the Nehru Centre in London. His plays Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Agni mattu Male (The Fire and the Rain), most of them complex re-enactments of Indian myths, are landmarks of Indian theatre. In Mumbai for the premiere of his latest play Bikhre Bimb (A Heap of Broken Images), Girish Karnad spoke to Sayandeb Chowdhury, about his latest play and issues of language and identity.

You are in Mumbai after a long time. Where have you been?

After returning from London after finishing my tenure with the Nehru Centre, where I had a whale of a time, I have been busy with the setting up of Rangashankara in Bangalore. It is a production and performance centre dedicated to theatre. Then I got busy with this new play. It brings together two issues that are important to me: the impact of technology on our lives and the debate about writers moving away from native languages, to write in English.

How do you connect the two?

They are interconnected. Technology has changed and is changing our lives in unrecognisable ways and I wanted to explore how it looks back at the way we self-fashion ourselves. In this case, the identity of the protagonist is further complicated by the fact that she is an unsuccessful Kannada writer facing the storm of local belligerence after she writes an English novel and attains international fame as well as makes money. So the play is an exploration of how, as she gains fame, her immediate surroundings, dominated by technology, interrogate the loss and then recovery of her identity.

The play seems to involve videography and live telecasts and has been mounted on a big scale. How do you fund its production?

So far, I have always found funding without begging. Yes, there are a lot of complicated visual techniques —screens, circuits and the flow of images—that are integral to the play and a young man called KM Chaitanya has helped me set them up.

The vernacular-English debate is particularly strong in Karnataka. And you have even been the subject of criticism from other writers.

With me the problem is that I translate my own plays, so I cannot be accused of writing in any one particular language and playing to the politics of either. But the issue is a touchy one. Bangalore is a metropolis that struggles with the local language and doesn’t even have one. In Calcutta it’s Bengali, in Chennai it is Tamil. Even in Mumbai, even though commerce has brought all kinds of people to the city, Marathi has stayed. But in Bangalore, there were always more speakers of Telugu and Tamil than Kannada. And in the waves of migration either during the British rule, in the 50s or in the 90s when IT bloomed, the Kannada language has suffered in importance. So the tension between the Kannada-speaking population and the other populations in Bangalore has never really subsided. There is an ownership issue.

Throughout your writing, you have been particularly drawn towards Indian mythology.

Yes, as I took to playwriting I realised how little of our varied and complex myths have been used in theatre. Except a bit of Tagore, there is hardly a playwright of yore who explored myths as they should be: a repository of complex and dynamic human elements. What we had are either costume dramas or sentimental trash. But look at the way the Greeks have used myth or modernists like Jean Anouilh did. I want to write plays like them. That is why I was so drawn to writers like Vijay Tendulkar or Badal Sircar, whose Evam Indrajit was my kind of play and therefore I directed it.

With the onslaught of cinema and now, television, do you think theatre has a future in India?

It does. There is no substitution to theatre’s intimate appeal, its human element. And there will be people who will always be interested in that. So it will survive.

What about acting in cinema? You seem to have taken yourself away from the genre.

I always did cinema so that I could make money to sustain my interests in theatre. And I have made what I needed. I want to concentrate now on theatre and theatre only.

You have also directed a couple of films. Any future film directorial assignments planned?

In all possibility, no. Look, I am not the filmmaker that I aspire to be. When I see a Ray, Kurosawa or Bergman on screen, I feel depressed, because I know I can never become one of them. But when I see a great aside in Shakespeare, a magical turn in Ibsen or a theatrical device used by Brecht, I feel the blood running faster in my veins. I feel an urge to write like them, to grow. And I have realised that I am fundamentally a playwright, nothing else. I am 68, and the rest of my life I just want to do this. And die, being known as one.