‘Indians are mad about music’

Manoj Shah talks about his musical Master Phoolmani, which draws from the lively, interactive Bhangwadi style of theatre. It will play at the Kala Ghoda Festival next week.

 

Master Phoolmani is about a pair of out-of-work actors and a pair of bank clerks. One of the actors dresses as a woman to act out the fantasies of a bank clerk. The play, scripted by Chandrakant Shah, is based on Satish Alekar’s Begum Barve. But it is spiked with material from the life of Jayashankar Sundari, who along with Bal Gandharva, was a legendary actor-singer famous for impersonating women onstage in the early 20th century.

 

In those days, women were not allowed to perform onstage. Jayashankar Sundari, who was from the Bhangwadi musical theatre tradition for most of his life, even taught young girls and the wives of rich seths how to wear saris and groom themselves. So Master Phoolmani is a play within a play. The two actors in the play also belong to the Bhangwadi tradition of theatre, which had lots of songs and encouraged interaction with the audience. Master Phoolmani is the only Gujarati play today with Gujarati songs, as all the commercial Gujarati plays have Hindi film songs. 

 

Bhangwadi was a lively style of musical plays that took its name from the theatre in Kalbadevi, where it was first played. Bhangwadi plays had so many songs because Indians are mad about music. These plays also encouraged interaction with the audience and responded to requests for encores for songs. Actor-singers would also insert impromptu topical issues into these songs. But interaction didn’t happen on its own; it was designed. Often ‘prompters’ would sit in the audience and start laughing—and the audience would follow. The more popular plays would go on all night. It was quite lively and occasionally spectacular, as real horses, double-decker buses or fire brigade engines would come onstage! 

 

If you go to Kalbadevi, you will find what used to be the Bhangwadi Theatre on the corner of Princess Street. Today, it is a shopping centre. But the entrance still has statues of two garlanded elephants and the board of the Desi Natak Samaj, which set up the Bhangwadi theatre in 1874. The theatre closed down in 1968. The performers were originally Gujarati Asaits who pioneered the Bhavai folk musical theatre. Bhavai was meant to create social change, and Bhangwadi occasionally continued its revolutionary tradition. For instance, during Gandhi’s freedom movement, there was a play in which a singer sang a freedom song, and threw off his headgear in his enthusiasm. Everybody in the audience did the same—and the theatre company provided the audience with khadi topis, which they promptly put on. This was absolutely revolutionary use of theatre because the British could have arrested them since khadi was banned at the time. Entire songs would be woven on dhoti and sari borders.

 

I have not underlined the physical relationship between the lonely out-of-work Bhangwadi actors and unemployed clerks in Master Phoolmani. Their need to connect was more important than sex. The actors who came to Bombay to play women’s roles were 10 or 11-year-old boys. They all lived together like a repertory company. There is no evidence of sexual relations between actor-singers. But if 40 guys live together for years, what would they do? Even though Jayashankar Sundari had a wonderful wife and a son, you could say that he was, in a (mischievous) sense, like Socrates.