‘Our plays are dispersed and edgy’

Playwright Manaswini Lata-Ravindra tells Subuhi Jiwani of the struggle to explore the confusion of her generation

 

With a mother who works with the Narmada Bachao Andolan and a father who has lobbied for the banning of sex determination tests, Marathi playwright and poet Manaswini Lata-Ravindra was bound to inherit political genes. Even her last name reflects her parents’ political leanings. Instead of bequeathing to Manaswini a last name that would signify the family caste, her parents gave her their first names—Lata and Ravindra.

 

Manaswini was recently selected as one of 12 playwrights from across the nation to attend the Royal Court Theatre workshop in Vasind beginning March 20. “It will help me explore my vision—and go beyond my limits—because I’m usually surrounded by Marathi-speaking people,” she says. Her first play, Cigarettes, won the Alpha Gaurav Puraskar 2005 nomination for best experimental playwright, while the director, Satish Manwar, won the Mama Varerkar Award for best director.

 

When land politics and women’s rights were being discussed over dinner, is it inevitable that progressive politics will trickle into your work? Manaswini thinks not. “There was a false idealism, a romanticism in the movements my parents were associated with. When I was small, I used to think that all problems—women rights’ violation, casteism—were vanishing from our country. In reality, nothing changed on a large scale. My parents and their colleagues were fighting for a better society. But my generation’s struggle is to explore confusion,” she says.

 

Cigarettes deals with modern-day romantic relationships that involve pre-marital sex. It met with the ire of Pune’s conservatives, who reacted to its ‘obscenity’. Though the actors get quite touchy-feely, the script’s kisses are not enacted onstage. Alvida, her second play, delves into the troubled relationship between an 18-year-old daughter and her activist mother, whose marriage to her activist father is in crisis.

 

“Some people objected to Cigarettes and made an issue of the ‘intimate’ scenes. But I think they didn’t like the fact that the girl chooses, and says ‘no’ to the boy,” Manaswini points out. Clearly, the woman holds centrestage in her plays, and she isn’t wary of using the term feminist to refer to herself. “It isn’t a gaali,” she insists.  

 

Women have flourished as novelists, poets and short story writers in Marathi literature, but their contribution to theatre has been minimal, she observes. But the emergence of young women playwrights like Manaswini and Irawati  Karnik is a sign that things are changing.

 

At the heart of Manaswini’s generation’s struggle lies a contradiction. “The plays of the earlier generation of Marathi playwrights definitely had rebellion. But my writing or that of my contemporaries, Sachin Kundalkar or Irawati Karnik, is not totally modern. We can’t throw away our traditions and at the same time, we can’t live with them,” she notes. “Besides, earlier, the plays had a specific start, middle and end. Our don’t have that structure—they’re dispersed and edgy. Maybe it is the influence of film, TV or other media, but it is typical of our expression,” she concludes.