CHENNAI: Artists do not fill their wounds so that they may speak through their work. From the essays of a newly translated collection, The Necropolis Trilogy (Copper Coin), 84-year-old Marathi playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar, may not seem severely hurt by life; or perhaps he has let it go. When he remembers those bruises, he greets them like old friends who have remained unforgettable, or who he has let down, or who he has allowed to nest rather permanently in his subconscious. For instance, his old family retainer Bhiwa, once the centre of his childhood; actor-singer Noor Jehan whose sight and voice on screen made him come of age and around whom he built a fantasy of inviting her home at the time of Partition to his family’s horror. Or, his curious relationship with the girl Mandakini. Or, the memory of having to leave home in Parwa in Vidarbha to study in big-city Nagpur and on his return, his father’s tough love, and his mother’s muted, though tender reception.
At a book launch in Delhi, friends and fraternity discuss Elkunchwar’s essays, and the significance of his nearly 60-year-long contribution to the arts. The launch is preceded by an introduction by Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi, who is also the director of Raza Foundation, that has co-organised the event. It is followed by reflections of poet and essayist Udayan Vajpeyi, and Sarabjeet Garcha, poet and publisher, Copper Coin, who has translated the essays from Marathi into English, on Elkunchwar’s work. And then there is the dramatised reading of the essays by theatre-person Sunit Tandon, even as director-actor Sohaila Kapur does a reading of a portion from his play Virasat.
An unconventional start
Elkunchwar came to the theatre late, at 28. While in college in Nagpur, he went to watch a film and, unable to get a ticket, he walked into a play that was being staged. It was his first play; films and theatre were taboo in his family. It was Vijay Tendulkar’s Mee Jinkalo Mee Haralo (I Won, I Lost), and it was being staged by director Vijaya Mehta.
The experience made him find his calling; in Mehta he found a mentor. She directed his play Sultan, which he wrote in 1967. Other than his long collaboration with Mehta, he also worked closely with Satyadev Dubey, another doyen of Marathi theatre. In 1984, Govind Nihalani made Party, a Hindi film based on Elkunchwar’s eponymous Marathi play.
‘Essays are like big trees’
Elkunchwar is one of the living legends of Indian theatre. If theatre in the ’60s was dominated by playwrights such as Girish Karnad, Badal Sircar, and Tendulkar, Elkunchwar came into prominence in the following decades. Always a form-breaker, his surreal and satirical plays are socio-political commentaries on the evolution of the family and the caste-afflicted society of his state and the nation; peopled with exploiters and the exploited, tensions in Hindu-Muslim relations stew just below the surface in many of his plays.
In The Necropolis Trilogy essays, he recalls images, music, personalities and architecture dear to the subcontinent and lost to time; they are thus a stare into the abyss, but also a spring back for an excavation so that their outlines stay visible — just as much as his plays like Wada Chirebandi (1985), written 35 years ago, that still speak to our times. No one is returning to the wada or ancestral home anymore, we like being big-city girls and boys now.
Udayan Vajpeyi points out that “no language is lost, it goes into hibernation, and so does civilisation. A song is also an expression of language. It is a consolation that in these times when the memory of so many things are dying, essays such as Elkunchwar’s are like big trees. Trees have secrets, but you have to stay with that tree”.
The first essay in The Necropolis Trilogy receives attention from most speakers at the event. Located in almost a massive graveyard outside Karachi, here Bhiwa, Meena Kumari and Medusa, Emily Dickinson, one of his muses—the book opens with her poem — and even Elkunchwar’s sister-in-law step in, as if in a dream, to fade out without preamble after saying their piece. What they (or Elkunchwar) leave in is as important as what they leave out — just like things unsaid or half-said in real life.
Collapsing dimensions
Elkunchwar began writing essays in the 1990s. They became popular, so he says he thought he must break the mould. “The search began with time and space. At a certain age you live in so many realities. I inhabit the reality of my dreams, of my mundane life, but if you are an artist you try to get rid of these (separate) dimensions, of what is real and unreal, and try to reach a place where the dimensions collapse…. I can’t destroy time and space but I can restructure them. I realised I could talk to my memories. Mandakini in Melbourne and a bather, who looks like (Italian actor) Marcello Mastroianni, are more real than all my realities. What is important is the reorganisation of experience not memories. I don’t chew the cud of my memory,” he says.
The evening also sees Elkunchwar making light of the famed silences and pauses in his plays. On being asked by theatre director Kirti Jain to explain them, he says the credit for that goes to Tendulkar whose economy in dialogues he admired. He then refers to the experience of staging Party. “Party had many characters. Once while writing it, the dialogue was not going anywhere so I wrote a dialogue but kept the next dialogue completely unconnected to what had gone before. Actors reading the script read a pause in that disconnection…At times, actors and directors see a pause in the script, they find a meaning for it, so sometimes there’s an actual pause but it can also get created.”
