BENGALURU: The ghost of a 20th century Marathi theatre artiste known for his female impersonations will haunt Ranga Shankara as his great granddaughter brings his memories alive this evening.
Lady Anandi, a documentary theatre piece and work in progress, is Anuja Ghosalkar’s attempt to write Madhorao Tipnis back into the history of Indian theatre.
Originally written with three characters, the solo features narrator Lady F, who is a writer-theatre actor, and an apparition of her great grandfather.
“I grew up listening to stories of him – that he drank 5 litres of milk a day. I didn’t know whether it was true or just a ploy to make me drink milk,” says the theatre actor, with a laugh.
She has, however, found an interview with Tipnis corroborating this.
“According to another story my maternal grandfather told me, his father even brought a real train carriage on stage,” she says.
The Fact vs Fiction Tightrope
But little about the man – co-founder of a Marathi drama company that began as Maharashtra Natak Mandali and later morphed into Bharat Natya Mandali – has found its way into the history of Indian theatre. The company, Marathi newspapers of those times have recorded, came up with the Chatrapati Shivaji headgear that the ruler is now popularly depicted wearing.
“His brother, whom he started the company with, is fairly well documented,” she says. When evidences didn’t suffice – and she resorted to fiction – she wove a narrative around a more dominant elder brother.
So the performance – a hybrid play reading of sorts ‘still rough around the edges’ – will feature a scene in which the older Tipnis draws a chalk line he instructs his saree-clad brother to walk along to practise a feminine gait.
“I read that he was actually made to wear lead anklets for this,” she says. “But I thought that image would be too dramatic -- almost filmi, you know. So I decided to dispense with it.”
Censorship and Sedition
A play Tipnis did, Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar’s Kichak Vadh, was banned by the British. She has retained references to this, ‘relevant even now’.
Many of the plays the group performed spoke out against the British, but they were mostly allegories cloaked as historical pieces. “Lokamanya Tilak was a patron of the group,” she says.
So in Lady Anandi, Anuja has introduced a bit with British officers backstage, debating the ban. “It opened in 1911, was banned in the next year and revived again in 1926,” she offers.
Bhaubandaki, by the same playwright, was another production of the company’s that was popular. It is from the character Tipnis essayed in this that Anuja’s 45-minute performance gets its title.
“She was a Peshwa’s wife, and literate,” she says. “She modified one word in a letter to get her nephew killed so that her son would be the successor.”
Tryst with Ancestors
For five years now, Anuja has been working with oral family history — she has researched the life of her grandfather Madhav Tipnis and blogged about it.
“When theatre declined in the 1930s, he moved to cinema,” she says. “He worked as a make-up artiste for theatre and cinema. So he alone, among all the brothers, became the carrier of stories about his father and his work.”
Personal is Political
“Why would I want to watch somehting like this on stage, I might as well come look at your family,” a well-known theatre person from the city told her Anuja when she discussed the idea that has become Lady Anandi with him.
So when she was at an artist residency in Sweden last year, and she had to come up with a script, she brought this up diffidently and was quick to dismiss it.
“But others there told me to work on it, and after a dramatised reading, told me to open with it too,” she says.
Lack of funding, which forced her to go public with the piece as a work in progress, has delighted the audience.
“Many even told me I don’t need a director,” she says. “And the play changes, often drastically, based on the audience interaction at the end of every show.”
Though the comment referring to family albums crushed her, she says going through with it was her way of defying patriarchy. “Who is anyone to tell us whose stories to record, and whose to leave out,” she says.
Her decision to be part of the show also stems partly from this.
“I see so many issue-based productions, but why lose out on the personal touch?” she asks. “I realised I needed to put myself out there, make myself vulnerable because I’m the repository of these stories.”
‘Was He More Feminine Than Me?’
At 34, four years ago, Anuja decided to become a full-time actor. “And I got told that my figure would allow me only certain roles,” she says.
Many directors have also told her to ‘stand like a woman’, that she ‘sounds like a man’. And Tipnis — active in Marathi theatre between 1901 and 1932 — was so thoroughly feminine on stage that he got letters of admiration from female fans that spoke of sisterhood, she says.
So Anuja has chosen to juxtapose the two actors, a century apart. “My shadow — you can see the paunch and all — falls on images of him,” she says, laughing.
And though these gender-related challenges in her journey have been irksome, she has chosen to present them with a touch of humour, she says.
Lady Anandi, a work-in-progress performance, on Thursday at 7.30 pm in Ranga Shankara, and on Saturday at 7.30 pm at Atta Galatta.