The one engagement of the many that I had with Ratan Thiyam that had history revolving around it was on October 30, 1984. I recall sitting with Ratan at a shoddy restaurant in Bhubaneswar, as we together translated into English his song ‘Dharamkshetra Kurukshetra’, sung at the close of the prologue by the flagbearers in his play Chakravyuha, now considered a classic of modern Indian theatre. The play was scheduled to be staged the next evening at an East Zone Theatre Festival sponsored by the Sangeet Natak Akademi.
I was part of a national jury asked to select from the lot one play, or maybe a couple at the most, for a national festival of young directors to be held at New Delhi a few months later. The performance needed a synopsis in English for the viewers, none of whom knew a word of Meiteilon (or Manipuri), a language that belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group and is radically different from the languages in the Indian mainstream.
What else was radically different? The visuals: Ratan was an excellent painter and designer in his own right. The soundscape: with the dominance of cymbals, conch shells, and the single-string Manipuri lute pena. The rich dance movements: the delicate, slow movements of the Vaishnava raasa woven together (and clashing at the same time) with the rhythmed violence of the Kuki-Zo martial practices. This complex presentation mode also told a complex story, reinterpreting the Hindu epic in a way that could not be conveyed in a summary of tight, compressed verbal text. Ratan had suggested that a translation of that one song, sung by the flagbearers in a war scene, could convey something of the complexity of meaning—for, at the end of it all, the play bodied forth and meant Manipur, as it was then (and worse now).
Even as we worked on the translation, with Ratan explaining the Manipuri text in his mix of Bengali and English, the public address system blared away, the screeching loudspeakers carrying scraps of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s address at a rally in a square nearby. There was no way we could follow her words, which the press reported next morning: “Even if I die in the service of the nation, every drop of my blood will contribute to its growth.” We finished our job even as the sirens of the patrol cars in the high-security convoy conveyed to us that the Prime Minister was on her way to the airport.
Next morning, as she walked from her residence in Delhi to her office for a TV interview with Peter Ustinov, Indira Gandhi was riddled with 30 bullets by her security guards. Her death was announced later in the day. The Chakravyuha performance was cancelled. But the little of the rehearsals that we had witnessed was enough for us in the jury to select it for the national festival a couple of months later. When I met him at the festival foyer in New Delhi, I hugged him and he burst into tears. He had just lost his first wife, Mukhra, a brilliant singer-actress.
Like all his plays, Chakravyuha revels in the spectacular grandeur of the multilayered Manipuri culture. Ratan took pride in its multiplicity, which he directly celebrated later in a play that he called Nine Hills and One Valley, for that is what Manipur meant to him—the valley Meiteis and the hill tribes contributing to a complex, composite culture now so tragically dismembered by a vicious political conspiracy.
In most of his productions, whether those growing out of a variety of Indian and foreign classics—ranging from the Hindu puranas to Shakespeare, Molière and Manoj Mitra—or his own original pieces, especially his Manipur Trilogy, he addressed the crisis in Manipur, celebrating its rich conglomeration of cultures, and critiquing the master texts and hegemonic values through sly, satiric interventions by minor characters. Like the flagbearers, who mark and identify their masters as ‘the great power-hunters’, engaged in ‘this mahayagna, with the great sacrificial rites of power’, turning the flagbearers into ‘the offering’. In Ratan’s performances, the spell of the spectacle is deliberately punctured again and again by these fissures.
To enact the sheer magic of his vision, Ratan needed a rigorously-trained, disciplined and dedicated repertory company that he maintained and supported throughout his life, labouring like mad on personal assignments to raise money and resources, with little support from the State. For all the expertise and enterprise he poured into his company, he faced all his life the problem of trained and accomplished artistes leaving him for better pastures. But he continued doggedly on his endeavour till the very end.
It was painful to see on video on my mobile phone the scene of his coffined body being taken up the steps of The Shrine, the magnificent theatre space and structure he had designed and constructed so lovingly. I recalled the last time I had met him at The Shrine in 2013. It was also the last time I visited Imphal, to deliver the first Maharajkumari Binodini Devi Memorial Lecture. I can only imagine how bitter his last days had been with the agony of cancer and a permanently violated and annihilated Manipur.
(Views are personal)
Samik Bandyopadhyay
Former Vice Chairman, National School of Drama and a Tagore National Fellow