The following article is a mildly edited version of an essay originally published in the newsletter The World of Girish Karnad, which is part of an open archive dedicated to Karnad's life in theatre, film, TV, scholarship and activism. For more on the archive, see Instagram, Facebook, and the newsletter.
The creative network
This week, we travel back to the 1970s, to Pune and Bombay, where Girish Karnad and a set of youngish writers, actors, and artists drank, quarrelled, and created a new style in cinema and on stage. The trio at the centre of this creative network were Karnad, Shyam Benegal and Satyadev Dubey.
In his college years in Dharwad, Karnad’s closest friend was Krishna Basrur, or ‘Kitti’. Basrur’s iconoclasm, his relative sophistication and his love of writing were magnetic to the young Karnad.
Basrur had a cousin in Bombay: a filmmaker named Shyam Benegal. Kitti would tell Benegal about his long-time friend, and eventually the three met in Bombay. They began hanging out, meeting over tea and samosas near Colaba Causeway, then drinking together into the night. Kitti “was a very imaginative, wonderful fellow. We used to love him on the unit,” Benegal told us. “When he got drunk, he was unruly as hell... and he was unreformable."
Before they ever worked together, Benegal was so intrigued by Karnad – and Karnad’s own early films made in Kannada – that he interviewed him for a 1973 cover story of the Times Weekly.
Benegal and Karnad also formed a trio with another force of nature, Satyadev Dubey, a writer, teacher and stage director.
Dubey had begun his career acting with Ebrahim Alkazi’s Theatre Unit. He took over in the early 60s, when Alkazi moved to Delhi to establish the National School of Drama.
Their Bombay was a heady scene of writing, rehearsals, affairs, arguments and reconciliations. Dubey’s space at Walchand Terrace – a gift from the industrialist Vinod Doshi – was at the heart of it. It buzzed with rehearsals in the day, and at night it filled with talk and drinking, and a row of mattresses laid out for anyone needing a place to sleep. It was a place where, as Karnad often recalled, you could fall asleep next to a great writer, and wake up next to a different great writer in the morning. He dedicated his play Anju Mallige to Walchand Terrace.
As Benegal told us:
“It was a very alive period, even for me. Dubey [and Karnad], when they were both not drunk, they would be at each other's throats. Then they would get drunk, and it would become a right royal fight... Then you'd find them in the morning, fast asleep next to each other.”
Along with Dubey, Karnad would be integral to three of Benegal’s films – Nishant, Manthan, and Bhumika – which came to define that moment in Bombay’s parallel cinema.
A fourth film, Kalyug, told the central story of the Mahabharata as a drama of business dynasties in 1980s Bombay.
That particular milieu had its own “brat pack”: writers, artists and actors who populated its films, again and again, in shifting combinations: art director and writer Shama Zaidi, cinematographer Govind Nihalani and music director Vanraj Bhatia among them. Most of the actors had their film debuts in Benegal’s early classics, which were all co-written by Dubey.
Some, like Anant Nag, Amrish Puri and Amol Palekar, had been Dubey’s students or discoveries in Bombay. Others, like Shabana Azmi and Om Puri, had come from the Film and Television Institute of India, in Pune, or like Smita Patil, had hung out on its campus.
Karnad had his own stint at FTII: at the age of 35, he was appointed the institute’s director. There he ran into two actors: one his immediate friend, and the other, at first, his adversary.
When Karnad arrived in Pune in January of 1974, to begin his term at the Institute, his first friend in the city was a postgraduate lecturer in psychiatry, a young man named Mohan Agashe.
Agashe would visit FTII three or four evenings a week, riding up on a Vespa he had borrowed from Karnad. “Best days of my life,” he told us.
“Arriving on a scooter that belonged to the director of FTII; watching Bresson, Kurosawa, whichever film he had chosen to screen; drinking his whisky, eating food cooked by his mother.”
“Unlike the others,” Mohan Agashe said, “my friendship with Girish was never professional.”
It was a turbulent year for theatre in Pune, and Agashe was right in the middle of it. Vijay Tendulkar’s play Ghashiram Kotwal had set off a storm of controversy, offending some Maharashtrian Brahmins with its frank view of history, caste and the exploitation of women in the Peshwa regime. The producers were forced to cancel the shows.
When the actors (mostly medical graduates, like Agashe) pulled together to stage it on their own, Karnad offered them the auditorium at FTII. The shows sold out, which helped to catapult the play to its eventual legendary status – and to seal Agashe’s lifelong friendship with Karnad.
On campus, however, Karnad was looking at trouble. The face of that trouble belonged to a young actor named Naseeruddin Shah.
This was the issue: at the institute, direction students completed their program by filming a short feature. The technical personnel on those shoots – think cameramen, recordists, editors – had to be drawn from FTII departments. There was no such rule for actors. “There were actually students of acting who went through their two years without once facing a camera,” Shah later wrote in his memoirs, And Then One Day, adding: “it stank.”
The actors’ protest built up into a hunger strike, and a furious confrontation – one that “created lasting animosities, and a heartburn that hasn’t yet subsided.” Both Karnad and Shah relived the FTII strike in their memoirs, published four decades later.
After the strike, those “lasting animosities” might have persisted between them. Instead, Shah wrote:
“Surprise Number 3 was a summons to Girish’s office whence I proceeded with some trepidation, to be informed by him that he had been sufficiently moved by my performance in Zoo Story to mention it to Shyam Benegal who right then was casting for his second film.”
Shah went to Bombay to meet Benegal, barely believing he would get the part in the film. Benegal “assured me that I seemed right for the part age-wise,” Shah later wrote, “Besides Girish thought highly of me and he felt more or less certain about me.”
Nishant (1975) was Shah’s first film, the debut Hindi film for Karnad, and an early film role for Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Amrish Puri and Kulbhushan Kharbanda. The film was co-written by Vijay Tendulkar and Dubey. It also had a cameo with Kitti Basrur (read our Instagram post on him here), who in the ad hoc style of the era, also ended up credited as assistant director and still photographer.
For Karnad, Nishant established a character type he would play through this era: the mild, even meek, modern Indian gentleman who runs into forces outside his control – above all, feudal patriarchy – and bent on defeating his best intentions.
Manthan (1976) boasted many of the usual suspects, and was also written by Tendulkar, this time along with Kaifi Azmi and Benegal, with Karnad’s involvement.
Manthan’s funding is something of a legend in Indian film history: it was the country’s first film to be completely crowdfunded. Five lakh dairy farmers in Gujarat came together to contribute two rupees each, producing a film with a piercing take on caste and class power and the uneven alliances between subaltern and elite benefactors. The very first frame of the film thus reads “500,000 farmers of Gujarat present.”
Manthan was recently restored in 4K by the Film Heritage Foundation.
On taking advantage of Karnad as a writer, Benegal told us:
“I had taken him as an actor. But he wouldn’t get out of your hair, and since he was there, and was himself a playwright, he understood ... how to develop a character. He could assume many different points of view. That kind of thing Girish was first-class at. I always valued that – because when he’s acting with you, you have him captive.”
For Bhumika (1977), which was set in a Marathi-speaking milieu, Benegal asked Karnad to come on officially as a co-writer with himself and Dubey. Their script won the National Award for the Best Screenplay. Smita Patil, the star of the film, won that year’s award for Best Actress.
In 1981, Karnad and Dubey teamed up again to write a very different script for Benegal, drawing on Karnad’s constant source of inspiration, the Mahabharata. In an interview with Sunita Paul on Doordarshan, Karnad described how that film came about:
"Once, Shyam said to me he wanted to make a film on the life of Karna, you know the mythological Karna. And I said, oh no, not Karna. How boring.
Several years later he said to me, I want to make a film about what's happened to industrial families… And suddenly it became clear, I said, Shyam, why don't you combine the two together."
Kalyug, starring Shashi Kapoor (also its producer), won best film at the 1982 Filmfare Awards, and Karnad Dubey were nominees for Best Story.
For all his work in film, the theatre remained Karnad’s first love. The same was true for his friend, the writer, director, teacher and irrepressible cultural force, Satyadev Dubey.
Dubey was the director who had discovered Dharamvir Bharati’s epochal Andha Yug. He was passionate about Indian languages and, until later in his life, sceptical about Indians writing in English. Dubey was one of the first directors to take on Yayati, starring his protégé Amrish Puri.
Punctuated by rounds of drinking, sparring and reconciliation, the Karnad x Dubey bond grew over the decades, through productions of Hayavadana, then Bali (with Naseeruddin and Ratna Pathak Shah) and later in both their lives, Dubey’s adaptation of Wedding Album.
“The first woman in Indian theatre to express her sexuality”: This was how Dubey saw Padmini, the female protagonist of Hayavadana. In 1970, Dubey directed the play with Amol Palekar and Amrish Puri in the lead male roles, and Sunila Pradhan as Padmini.
For his staging, he took out all of Padmini’s lines where she offered either explanation or apology for herself – leaving her desires and sexuality bold and unapologetic.
The theatre director Sunil Shanbag recalled that show for us:
“The bare stage with flat lighting and a battered steel folding chair that greeted us at Tejpal auditorium in 1972 didn’t prepare us for the magic to follow...
I was still in school, but home on vacation and that evening remains etched in my memory. I was mesmerised by how the brilliant text, the staging, the music, and the performances created magic on that bare stage. When I left the auditorium my friend nudged me and pointed to a frowning, long-haired man in dishevelled clothes and whispered, ‘That’s Dubey…’ As I travelled home in the local train from Grant Road I thought … If this is theatre then this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Dubey considered Hayavadana a high point of his directing career.
“The play, staged almost simultaneously in 1972 by Karanth in Delhi and Dubey in Bombay, was hailed as the beginning of the ‘Theatre of the Roots’ movement in India,” Karnad later wrote, in a chapter intended for his memoir.
Vijay Tendulkar watched Dubey’s show in Bombay, and said to Karnad afterward: “I too want to use folk forms in a play. I’ll sit down to write at once.” The result was Ghashiram Kotwal.
By the 1980s, Dubey and Karnad were tried and tested collaborators. They had worked on Benegal’s films, and written Bhumika together. Dubey said that he now just “assumed that if Girish had written a play, I had automatic rights over it” – which caused major confusion when, in 1988, he launched into staging Nagamandala, even though Karnad had given the rights to Vijaya Mehta.
Writing from Chicago, Karnad tried to make his friend see reason. Dubey refused. “This is a trial of strength,” he wrote back. “Try stopping me. I am not logical – I am Satyadev Dubey.”
Dubey’s plans to direct Bali, with Naseeruddin and Ratna Pathak Shah – playing the King and Queen respectively – grew so protracted that he eventually had to ask if everyone still wanted to do it.
Karnad thought they should cancel. Pathak Shah didn’t love the play, but thought the role was a good one. The question was settled after Shah rang, and said: “Dubeyji... how badly can we do it?”
One of their final collaborations was Dubey’s Marathi production of Karnad’s Wedding Album, titled Sapadlelya Atahvani. It opened alongside Lillete Dubey’s long-running production in English.
Dubey had a rare power over Karnad – to criticise his work, and to edit him however he felt necessary.
In Satyadev Dubey: A Fifty-year Journey Through Theatre, a volume edited by Shanta Gokhale, Dubey talks about watching Lillete Dubey’s English show: “I saw first and foremost what are the things I had to throw out and I threw them out.”
He thought the play was full of problems; above all that Karnad was doing too much. He was “trying to encompass the entire world,” while using the intimate material of his own family stories. “The thing spread itself out so broadly that nothing remained.”
“So I concentrated on the family, the mother, the two daughters – the father like all men was not important.”
It did not go down well with Karnad: “I was hopping mad. Wedding Album is about a family. Dubey hadn’t a clue about family life. It was harrowing for me to see what was being passed off as my play.” He also added that Dubey “knew I was upset but I never spoke to him about it. And, it never came in the way of our relationship.”
Otherwise, Karnad regarded Dubey as a director loyal, above all else, to the text. So when Dubey asked him for rewrites, sometimes even going back and forth between versions, Karnad obeyed.
“[Dubey] calls me not India’s very good playwright,” he later said, “But a very good rewriter.”
