'Several of my plays have run into resistance,' says Sunil Shanbag

The play Sex Morality & Censorship pulled a telling stunt to tempt the viewer. It blipped the alphabet ‘o’ out of the title, leaving a tantalising asterisk in its place thus: S*x M*rality & Cens*rship.

Over the last few years, the arts have become a particularly favourite target of the moral brigade. Whether it is an exhibition of provocative artworks or staging of a play with a title like Maruti ani Champagne, it is hard to say what could set this league of ultrasensitive citizens off.

 S*x M*rality & Cens*rship looks back in some nostalgia at the 60s and 70s when artistes were a more rebellious and gritty community than they are today and when they fought pitched court battles to win their right to express themselves.

The play revolves around director Kamalakar Sarang’s fight to stage Vijay Tendulkar’s Sakharam Binder for the first time in Mumbai in 1974.

The play’s protagonist was a foul-mouthed man who lived life on his own terms and exploited women, though with a surprising forthrightness that made him vaguely likeable.

There was an uproar from predictable quarters that saw the play being banned, staged underground and then censored on ridiculous conditions. Sarang defied all strictures, refused a compromise and finally won the legal battle by staging for the judge a hilariously blipped version of the play.

Director Sunil Shanbag uses two sutradhars, a lavani dancer and a shahir, to tell the story scripted by Shanta Gokhale and Irawati Karnik. There is enough music and dance in the play to hold audience interest in an otherwise grim play.

Except for a distractingly long and somewhat forced audio-visual interlude when the director pays tribute to the spirit of the 60s and 70s, the play delivers its message well. At the recently concluded national theatre festival in Delhi, it ended with a standing ovation at both shows.  The play will now be staged at the Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai from Thursday the 11th to Sunday the 14th.

In this interview, Shanbag tells The Mag why the play needs to be staged.

Given the kind of heat censorship issues generate today, how did you find the nerve to attempt a play that stands up against the so-called morality brigade?
Several of my plays have run into resistance from the Stage Scrutiny Board (that’s the official name for the stage censor board in Maharashtra) over many years. Most of the objections are very flimsy and sometimes border on the ridiculous. Usually objections are to expressions of sexuality — mainly female — and to political ideas.
It is very easy to find compromises — indeed you are always encouraged to, so that no one has to engage with the issue at hand. But I am stubborn, even pig-headed about these things, and have always tried to engage in a discussion with the individuals in the scrutiny board on the objections to my play. It’s interesting that most often I have managed to convince them to let the play be staged without cuts.
The morality brigade is another issue: far more dangerous and unpredictable. But fortunately I have had no direct experience of such an attack. I did this play because I think it is important to discuss these issues. Discuss them with a serious intent and with intelligence.


As you mention in your director’s note, this play was tough because it strings together just ideas into a non-existent storyline.  How did you give it the shape it finally acquired?
The play is in two acts and each act has a style. In the first act we are laying out the background of censorship in theatre, and the context in which it is used, both by the state and by society in general. So it is like an argument. But we use a lot of little excerpts from the theatre of its time, and music and dance, so it all flows quite seamlessly and the audience is drawn along with the ideas. In the second act, we get into the specifics of the Sakharam Binder case and recreate some of the key moments.  Since we use the play Sakharam Binder as a kind of filter to view censorship, I was very keen to use a synoptic playing of the play as a kind of dramatic spine that holds the whole piece together.

Was the use of music and dance an attempt to take some of the edge off or make it more palatable? How exactly did you foresee the roles the lavani dancer and shahir would play?
Shanta Gokhale came up with the idea of juxtaposing the story of the sanitising of the tamasha tradition by conservative urban audiences. The idea was to also tell the story of a little tradition that has suffered because of moral censorship by society — much as the same section tried to do with Sakharam Binder. So with tamasha came music and dance — it was inevitable. 
I loved the idea also because it gave us the opportunity to use music and dance. They add colour, comment, and a theatricality that is so essential for a work of this kind. So, what we have is a shahir from the tamasha tradition being asked to present a work exploring censorship, and along the way he and Lavanya make constant references to their own experience in tamasha. While the shahir represents in a sense the long tradition of tamasha, Lavanya represents the current generation of lavani dancers who are not as rooted to tradition, but in fact see lavani as a way of making a living. The two views create an interesting tension.

Did you run into opposition to your play from the usual quarters?
No, we have had no opposition to the play so far.

Would you stage the play in a city where the moral brigade is in full force, say Bhopal?
I would be very happy to stage the play in any place as long as the performance happens within a stated context of serious theatre.  We are happy to deal with resistance, criticism, or attack within this context. Because that is the spirit in which the play has been made. 

You make the point in the play that today you don’t find creative people with the kind of mettle that Tendulkar or Sarang possessed and that it is now considered okay to give up the battle even before it begins. How do you see yourself reacting in Sarang’s place?
Well, it is a bit unfair to compare the two generations quite like that because Kamlakar Sarang fought his battle in a different historical time. I wonder how he’d respond to the same attack in today’s times.  Yet, it is important to know that theatre, or a work of art, was so important that large sections of society took a stand for or against it. That I think is the key difference. When we performed the play in Pune recently we had many, many young theatre people in the audience. Do you know what they said? They said they felt so envious that theatre was taken so seriously at one time. I think that’s very revealing of the times we live in. In a way it is liberating not to have theatre placed on a platform and revered as it perhaps was, but at the same time it is tragic that no one, not even those making the theatre, feel it is important enough.