Theatre saved my sanity: Naseeruddin Shah

There was a time, many years ago, when Naseeruddin Shah was fed up of acting in movies. “That was when actors did double shifts,” he recalls. “I had to do that on several occasions, and incidentally, the films I was doing back then were total crap. It was a period of five or six years, when I was really miserable. Theatre saved my sanity. We would even rehearse for the plays in the make-up room.”

It’s been over four decades now, but his love affair with the stage refuses to lose steam. “Theatre is a living medium and that’s the joy of doing it,” he states simply. And that’s the reason the actor has consistently delivered the goods on stage. Till just a few months ago, he had been busy staging his play, The Father, one of his most ambitious projects, which had a month-long run at the NCPA Experimental Theatre. And here we are again, sitting inside the hallowed interiors of Prithvi Theatre, as he watches his troop of actors getting ready for the technical rehearsals of his next play. Aurat! Aurat!! Aurat!!! is the third part of his tribute to Ismat Chughtai, the celebrated Urdu writer, after Ismat Apa Ke Naam and Kambhakt Bilkul Aurat. 

Unlike the past monologues, this time, he has multiple actors on stage — all women — and Naseer has chosen to only direct the play. “Just like the earlier ones, I hope this play too strikes a chord with the audience. It’s funny and talks about women asserting themselves. Though there are some things in it,  which people might think don’t happen now (as this was written in the ’40s), the fact remains that they are not all that different. Even if some of them are not true anymore, they are worth reiterating to remind the audience of the courage it took to write this stuff in the ’30s and ’40s for a Muslim woman, coming from an orthodox family. Today, she would have been probably murdered by some mad fundamentalist for saying these things!” he exclaims.

In director mode now, he watches, as his wife Ratna Pathak Shah discusses the costumes with the actors, the technicians adjust the lights and the props are put in place, before facing us for a chat...

You keep going back to Ismat Chughtai. What is it about her writings that inspires you?

I can see the stories because they seem to reflect my extended family. My kin is from a place near Meerut, from exactly the kind of milieu she writes about — the fading aristocracy, clinging on to the so-called glory of the past, indulging in a lot of peccadilloes and some serious things also, including pulling guns and threatening each other. 

My mom had 19 siblings out of whom 11 survived, but that means for almost close to four decades, her mom only bore one child after another! The eldest had children who were older than the youngest sibling! There were old men marrying young women, brothers insisting on asserting their right on their widowed sisters-in-law and s*** like that. She writes about all this and I have witnessed it at close quarters, so it just has a tremendous resonance.

I can visualise these stories and she's so funny and so wicked, I just love it! (Laughs) She doesn’t claim to be very meaningful. She says I write about the people I know. And there is this amazing compassion she has for everyone she writes about. It’s a treasure I have stumbled upon. I feel privileged and I just can’t stop. This is the third part of it but in between I staged Lihaaf. And there’re so many more I want to do.

Most people here would know her only for Lihaaf...

(Cuts in) And it’s a real tragedy! That’s something we talk about in one of the plays, in a commentary by Urdu fiction writer Balraj Menra, who said that people just considered her an obscene writer of sexual stories. But there are hundreds of stories, 10 full-length novels, that nobody talks about. Most people have read the translation of Lihaaf. I wonder whether the richness of the language gets across in translation, but at least people are familiar with it. I wish that people would read her. She’s a great writer.

Not many people are aware that you acted with her in the 1978 film, Junoon?

Yes, and we were all very condescending towards her. ‘Poor Ismat Apa, she has never acted before, we have to take care of her’ — hers is the best bloody performance in the film (laughs)! When I see it today, it's Shabana Azmi's performance and Ismat Apa’s performance. Everybody else is showing off to high heaven, most of all, yours truly!

There were some really acclaimed actors in that movie...

Yes, all hamming it up, like crazy! (Laughs)

How did you find her, as a person?

She was a sweetheart. I never took her to be anything but this cute, cuddly, gossipy grandma. She was always like, ‘batao batao, woh Nafisa (Ali) achchi lagti hai tumhe?’ and things like that (smiles). She was always full of zest and fun. She would ask me a lot about myself, never asked if I read her work, and I loved talking to her. She was a great listener. That is the real sign of greatness. Otherwise, you see celebrated people, they never ask you questions, they are always waiting to be questioned.

You had never read her writings before that?

No! It was only a couple of years after her death, that I walked into a bookstore and came across a book of hers and decided to buy it, out of affection for Ismat Apa. It was an English translation, a bad one at that and still, I was blown away! I thought if in English they are so amazing, they must be magic in the original. I kick myself now, thinking I had access to her, but I never bothered to meet her. I wish she could have seen our work.

You don’t adapt her works to modern times...

There’s no need. Adapting it to modern times would ruin the beauty of it. These are things she wrote in the ’40s and they still stand true. Great writing transcends its time. The text to me is sacred.

The earlier parts were monologues. You have multiple actors on stage this time. Why the change in format?

The ones we have done earlier were stories that one person can tell and hold an audience. These are not stories, but essays. Here, the first one is out of her autobiography. Since we have these lovely actors, I just thought it would be great to stage those scenes — her childhood, how she rebelled against getting married when she was 13 and insisted on studying, what made her the rebel that she was. So we are staging all that. Only the last one is sort of a story being done by Seema Pahwa, which will be a monologue.

The play will premiere on April 10 at 9 pm at Prithvi Theatre.