Mumbai theatre throbs with a commercial synergy. Several pages in every Friday newspaper are crowded with advertisements for plays to be staged over the weekend in English, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati. Several actors are able to perform in all four languages and often do a matinee in one suburb in one language and then rush to do an evening show in another language elsewhere! And it has been like this for over a hundred years now.
A recently published autobiography of an actress of the 1930s, Vandana Mishra who could act in Marathi, Gujarati and Marwari, fills an important gap in the early history of theatre in Mumbai. Called, I, the Salt Doll and translated from Marathi into English by Jerry Pinto, it follows the fortunes of a young Maharashtrian girl who grows up in two rooms in a chawl with her widowed mother, then goes on to become a leading actress on the commercial stage and even retires before she turns 20!
Vandana’s initial training and debut performance was with Mama Warerkar, one of the pioneers of a Stanislavski approach to acting in Marathi. This approach, now known as ‘method acting’, equips the actor with the tools to create a deeply researched, emotionally true performance. Several days of script-reading and discussion, and the staging of largely realistic plays based on the Ibsen model was how she began. She was one of the first women to appear on the Marathi stage. In 1943, when Marathi theatre celebrated its centenary, thousands thronged to watch her perform on an improvised stage set up on Chowpatty beach.
But financial compulsions pushed Vandana towards the commercial Gujarati stage with its stylised performances against painted backdrops. I recall seeing a play in the late 60s in the last days of the Bhangwadi Theatre in Kalbadevi, where Vandana had become a heartthrob 25 years earlier. The plays performed here belonged to the Parsi style: melodramas borrowed from the Victorian tradition, with a comic side plot and as many as 30 songs in each lavishly mounted production.
It was on this stage where she played the romantic lead in the Marwari play Ramu Chanana, which ran for two-and-a-half years. It was a hit in Calcutta, and packing up his sets and costumes, writer director Bharat Vyas came to Mumbai to restage it. While his brother played the hero, he looked for a lead actress. After hectic rehearsals over three weeks, mastering dialogue in Rajasthani, a new language to her, Vandana put on an elaborate 80 panel ghagra and lots of gold jewellery to play the heroine.
Her nightly fee of `350 was a princely sum at the time, and it had to be placed on her makeup table before she started dressing for the show. The play was a melodramatic rendering of a love story between a poor goldsmith boy and a rich Thakur girl. It ended with her committing suicide when she sees the body of her lover. The suicide was often delayed as the audience insisted on her singing her last song over and over again before killing herself.
Thousands saw the play as it had tremendous ‘repeat value’ due to its catchy music. Many Marwari women would also request Vandana to wear their real jewellery on stage for a show. She was one of the first female ‘stars’ of the Mumbai theatre and her autobiography gives us a fascinating peep into how Mumbai drama developed just before and after Independence.
The writer is a Delhi-based theatre director
feisal.alkazi@rediffmail.com