In the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, when the idea of a national culture was still crystallising, a fiery debate wracked Delhi’s cultural circles – what will modern Indian theatre be? The government had set up the National School of Drama but the question was far from settled. Should modern Indian theatre be a reflection of the contemporary Western trends dominating urban centres? Our living and lively regional folk traditions? The largely mordant Sanskrit forms the classicists were arguing for? Maybe a hybrid?
When the curtains parted in 1968 on Jasma Odan at the lovely new open-air Meghdoot Theatre built under a sprawling banyan tree behind Rabindra Bhavan in Mandi House, the answer was apparent. Here was a play drawn from the Gujarati folk form bhavai, but with a different aesthetic and approach. It told the story of a woman’s unwavering courage and fidelity but with contemporary resonance and the regressive bits scrubbed clean. The loose structure of the folk form was disciplined and the costumes were earthy, not tinsel.
It was an energetic and bright production marking the convocation that year of the National School of Drama or, as everyone calls it, NSD – 40 songs, infectious dancing, two crackling jesters, and bhoongal (folk trumpet) players brought all the way from Gujarat. Delhi, it is said, was instantly smitten. Jasma Odan was a resounding success, appealing to an audience well beyond the urban cognoscente, finding working class viewers in Delhi and outside.
The play’s director was Shanta Gandhi, a teacher at NSD, which was headed at the time by the great Ebrahim Alkazi. Gandhi was an indomitable figure in theatre – a veteran of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, a dancer from Uday Shankar’s academy, a social activist and a scholar with a firm footing in both Natyashastra and the regional traditions of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
“Play[w]rights were liberated to discover an alternative to the rigid three-act structure of western naturalistic drama, as well as the fact that the use of prose, verse and song gave a multilayered texture to the script,” recalls actor-director Amal Allana in Holding Time Captive, her biography of her father Ebrahim Alkazi. She was herself a second-year student at NSD then, with a small role in Jasma Odan as a fairy.
The Jasma experiment, the first musical staged by NSD, convinced Alkazi that folk traditions gave students a thorough training tool, even if it was to approach modern theatre. He followed it up with Hindi adaptations of two Bertolt Brecht plays with strong musical backbones: Teen Takke ka Swang and Caucasian Chalk Circle. In the 60 years since, NSD has staged numerous musicals, many of them huge box office hits.
Whether it was NSD’s own work or the outside productions that it staged, musicals became a distinctive feature of both the school and its repertory company. Sainyan Bhaye Kotwal, Begum ka Takia, Dushman, Amar Singh Rathod, Bhand Duhai, Mattavilas, Barnum Vana, Urubhangam, Mena Gurjari, Karmawali, Muavze, Bidesiya, Laila Majnu, Sharvilak, Nati Binodini, Ghashiram Kotwal and Inder Sabha are among its great music-rich plays.
Some of the greatest theatre musicians of the last many decades worked with its productions – Panchanan Pathak, Mohan Upreti, Vanraj Bhatia, Kajal Ghosh, Kamal Tiwari and Sushil Dasgupta, among them. A number of its alumni – the late Uttara Baokar, Raghuvir Yadav and Annu Kapoor – are known as much for their vocal skills as their acting chops. Old-timers still recall in awe Baokar’s rendition of the dadra, Lakhon ke bol sahe, as Raunaq in Ranjit Kapoor’s Begum ka Takia.
This year, as the NSD Repertory Company completed 60 years, it celebrated this musical legacy with the programme Rang Sangeet directed by veteran Lokendra Trivedi. “NSD was musical theatre from the very beginning,” said Trivedi, who joined the NSD Repertory Company in 1982. “I had good music memory so I was part of practically every musical.”
At Studio 1 of NSD, Trivedi put students through a series of rehearsals for Rang Sangeet. Included in the repertoire were a great many songs that have passed into legend at the school: Usha Banerjee’s Rang bhari na maaro pichkari from Sainyan Bhaye Kotwal, Mohan Upreti’s Jafao sitam ki sazawar hoon from Inder Sabha, Bhaskar Chandavarkar’s Path deep jale phaila ujiyara from Sharvilak, Kamal Tiwari’s Paave Jaane or Vanraj Bhatia’s Jab main ladki thi from Teen Takke ka Swang or BV Karanth’s Gajananam Bhutaganadi Sevitam from Babuji.
Melting pot
Music and dance have been inalienable parts of indigenous Indian theatre forms. Folk theatre traditions are replete with them, from jatra to nautanki, tamasha to bhavai, and Yakshagana to Pandavani. Theatre forms that grew popular in the late 19th century also included them – Marathi natya sangeet was more classical opera than theatre and Parsi theatre thrived on vivid glossy doses of dance and music. Even the more recently formed IPTA, or Indian People’s Theatre Association, is known for its rousing music and many of its composers and lyricists were integral to the Hindi film industry.
In Delhi, a lot was brewing in the 1950s theatre scene. Theatre artiste Sheila Bhatia had moved from Lahore to Delhi after Partition and set up the Delhi Art Theatre, which specialised in women-based Punjabi folk operas, such as Dard Aayega Dabe Paon and Sulagda Darya. And Habib Tanvir had staged Agra Bazar by 1954, melding Brechtian techniques and folk music to tell modern stories.
But it was realistic Western theatre that dominated most elite spaces.
When B Jayashree arrived in Delhi to study at NSD in 1970, she was no stranger to drama. She is the granddaughter of noted Kannada theatre director Gubbi Veeranna and had worked with his legendary theatre company, which made liberal use of folk idioms, costumes, vivid backdrops and comedy.
She recalls being taken aback by the general lack of music and rhythm in the capital’s theatre scene. “I was already a singer-artiste,” she recalled. “And music, including classical, was an integral part of the troupe’s works. It was in my head and my heart. Rhythm and melody were like the life breath of that theatre. Everything flowed from it, where, how, when of every scene.”
Jasma Odan then was familiar turf for Jayashree. She had a small role in the chorus but it got her an insight into the play. When she returned home to Bangalore in 1973, the first play she staged was a Kannada version of Jasma. It went on to do 50 shows.
Dramatic structure
In the years leading up to Jasma Odan, music had started making its way into NSD’s plays, albeit in smaller measures. In 1963, Alkazi had staged a breathtaking production of Dharamvir Bharti’s radio play on the death and devastation wreaked by the battle of Kurukshetra in Mahabharata.
Staged in the “pitted” ramparts of Feroze Shah Kotla, a never before theatrical experience, it was Indian in content but more Greek in its approach to the tragedy. The costumes, Allana recalls, were spare, while the setting was epic and open to the elements.
The music was a part of the narrative, a practice called katha gaayan. Alkazi says in his note to the play: “For music I discarded the classical because the alap too refined and sophisticated, instead we chose primitive-sounding folk and tribal chants for their feel of ‘hordes’, of the raucous, hard-pressed cries of human beings at the end of their tether.”
When Andha Yug was restaged in 1973 and this time at the grand Purana Qila, it had music by the great Vanraj Bhatia. He was to also compose for the Hindi versions of the Three Penny Opera, Caucasian Chalk Circle and Tughlaq. Raina, who acted in the Three Penny Opera, recalls how the music was woven into the plot.
“I saw music as a part of the dialogue and the dramatic structure,” he said. “These are not ‘pretty’ songs meant to embellish the play but a part of the situation itself.”
In 1980 came the blockbuster Saiyan Bhaye Kotwal, a musical adapted by Usha Banerjee from the Marathi show Vichha Majhi Puri Kara. The lead role of Mainawati was performed by Uttara Baokar. Trivedi recalls playing the harmonium for the play’s peppy score for as many as 125 shows.
An equally big role in NSD’s musical journey was the immense talent of its composers, each of whom brought a distinct style, says Amitabh Srivastava, actor and senior alumnus of the school. Pannikkar came with his intimate knowledge of Kerala’s Sopanam music, Karanth with Karnataka’s Yakshagana traditions, Upreti with his early work at IPTA and Kumaoni folk music, Pathak with nautanki, and Bhatia with his eclectic East-West approach.
What made them even more exceptional was their ability to wrest music from any dramatic situation. Srivastava recalls of Karanth’s work: “You could give him any text or dialogue and it didn’t matter how prosaic it was, he could convert it to music. We did a huge student production of Andher Nagri with him in 1978 and he could turn any line into a song, even something like: ‘Kotwal ko pakad lao!’”
As then, music remains an essential part of theatre training at NSD, says Srivastava. “We were taught voice, speech, physical movements and music – songs from plays, musicals, basic singing, folk songs and so on,” he said. “Even if you were not musical to begin with, by the third year you had a sense of music and rhythm.”
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.
