Sunil Shanbag was one of the 42 awardees for the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) this year. A great deal of drama happened over this theatrewallah’s name being on that list. As a report in the Economic Times on June 23, 2018 informed us, Sanskar Bharti, the cultural wing of the RSS, had demanded that his name be taken off the list. They said that he was part of the ‘award wapsi’ campaign in 2015 and had often critiqued the government for its hold over cultural institutions.
While many cultural practitioners immediately wrote to the SNA in favour of Sunil’s stellar work over decades in theatre, in a courageous show of integrity, the SNA too stood its ground, and Sunil was in the list of winners when they were announced. In this context, it is important for us to understand how the work of the artist that can disturb and cause such discomfort to organisations like Sanskar Bharti. What must be so critical in the artist’s practice that raises their hackles so?
I have indeed been fortunate. Over the past 17 years, I have worked with the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), which has given me a very important vantage point of seeing the work that is being done in theatre across India. It has enabled discussions with artists, developing proposals, raising resources, watching closely how artists make work, witnessing their struggles and being part of their journeys of explorations. And in that larger context, I would like to share my reflections on experiencing the work of Sunil Shanbag – of Sunil pursuing his practice – and what I think makes it critical in the scenario of making theatre in contemporary India.
When I think of the work of any artist, I see the journey of the individual arts practitioner; and their being an integral part of a larger community, and society.
Let’s begin with the artist as an individual practitioner. One can notice three aspects that make their practice critical – the subject that they choose to work with, the ways in which they make their work, and the impact their work has on others. Sunil challenges and pushes the boundaries of each of them.
How we see the world around us/ What we see in it/ What must then, we talk about in our work/ What is important and why/ Why is something relevant and to whom/ What is the politics of arts and culture/ What role does it play in society – these are questions that often do not get asked by artists, or are not understood or articulated clearly in relation to the world they live and work in. Artists struggle to answer ‘why we make what we make’.
Over the past many decades Sunil’s work across various genres of theatre practices has been engaging with and presenting the complex nature of contemporary India on stage as well as at various alternative spaces. He is a man with curiosity, interest and expertise and his work spans across themes and issues that concern modern Indian society and our quotidian lives. From historical perspectives and present realities, to imaginations of the future; from stories of love and loss to oppressions, resistance and dissent – nothing is beyond his area of interest – if they are relevant to our lives and times. This makes his work an intricate mix of layered understandings of society. Drawing in threads from sociology, cultural studies, economics and literature he builds his work like a maze of ideas encountering the contemporary.
He is also a director who journeys with the multitudes of voices that often remain unheard and invisible in this world due to the clamour of dominant narratives. Analysing the dynamics of power and how they play out in society across class, caste, gender and sexualities, often, his work challenges the very notions of this dominance that has become all so pervasive in our neoliberal lives. Whether it is about questions of morality or rights of labour; homosexuality or censorship; nationalism or patriarchy – his work picks up stories and opens its veins to find – not necessarily answers – but more importantly the questions we must ask.
And I want to invoke here characters from his plays who do that – the Laavni dancer in Sex Morality and Censorship; the queer man in Dreams of Taleem; the Dalit voice from Dhasal’s poetry in Blank Page; and Galileo, in Words Have Been Uttered. Sunil’s work enables the space on his stage to make us confront these stories. Cesar Cruz – an American gang violence prevention advocate and academic at the Harvard University, and Banksy – a British artist, have both been attributed the saying “Art must comfort the disturbed; and disturb the comfortable” Sunil’s work asks questions of both comfort and disturbance. If the personal is the political – Sunil’s work connects the political to the personal.
A scene from ‘Words Have Been Uttered’. Credit: Facebook.
Moving on from choosing his subject, let us examine the making of Sunil’s work. There is a tendency among artists to stick to patterns especially if they are successful, a normalisation of form, using technology to say nothing more than what could have been said without it, and a lack of understanding of the fact that how we say is as important as what we say. Also, artists often get attached to a certain idea for content and then a particular form – quite separate from each other – and try to make them work together even when the content and form don’t speak to each other. Sunil has struggled and experimented with this jugalbandi in many ways.
To begin with, Sunil looks into multiple sources of information and knowledge to prepare for his work. The rigour and discipline with which he approaches his chosen subject of work takes on to emulate techniques of both an archeologist and a scientist. Asking questions of both archives and experts, across areas such as history, political science and sociology, Sunil looks at all kinds of materials that include legal documents, personal memorabilia, oral narratives and textual evidences to study and ready himself for making work.
Theatre for Sunil is an integrated open space for ideas where he needs to find a device that will articulate and communicate those ideas. He draws from various worlds of the arts – visual arts, music, and poetry to name a few. It is not accidental that Sudhir Patwardhan, whose work on working bodies in Mumbai put urban labour on the canvas of visual arts, is also the artist to have drawn the backdrop for Cotton 56 Polyester 84. The world of music and ideas around translation fuels his Club Desire.
Sunil’s knowledge of various traditional and contemporary forms across the arts enables him to choose appropriately what works for the stories he wants to tell us. Looking back at the works I have seen I can perhaps spot devices that he creates and uses – the play in a play format when he is drawing on history to comment on the contemporary – like he does in Sex Morality and Censorship and the adaptation of Dak Ghar; little pieces of play strung together much like how a musical piece is, when he is telling us about the history of music in Stories In A Song; the teatro form from Goa when he wants to make sharp political commentaries laid out in a story that is in utter contrast to it – in Loretta; and an almost bare stage when he is speaking about homosexuality in Dreams of Taleem. And then again when he is working with the idea of resistance and dissent using text and poetry, he ruptures the form of linearity of time in theatre to create little poems or chapters on stage – like he does in Blank Page and Words Have Been Uttered. One can clearly see the mind of a curator situating ideas on stage like an interlinked exhibition of thoughts and experiences.
A very important aspect of Sunil’s work is that unlike a lot of other successful art makers, he is not trapped by the boundaries of his success. Each piece is different from the earlier ones, as he moves from one experiment to another. But the most delightful experience of watching Sunil’s work is the realisation that while each play is fresh and original, one can sense an underlying thread that builds on the previous one. This sense of a journey – with continuities, ruptures, arrivals and departures – enables us to see the artist and his growth in his creations. This too I miss often in some of the work I experience elsewhere. I come out of a show and wonder where the artist was in their creation – where was their voice – how was I a part of their journey? This too is an important aspect of how an artist’s work becomes critical in our times.
When we discuss criticality we cannot but engage with the idea of doubts and failure. Often artists stay immune to their creations that are not working. But with Sunil it’s different. I remember the first time some of us went to see Club Desire. We felt something did not quite work and we expressed our concerns to Sunil. I am sure he would have intuitively felt it too. Now given how little time he has on his hands, Sunil could have just let it go and closed the production, or continued without paying any attention to the issues we raised. However, what happened is that he went back to the drawing board and came up with another version of the production. And this time it worked much better. This dealing with failure, allowing doubt and discontent to enable continuous work-in-progress I think is critical to its making.
The third aspect of pursuing critical practice as an individual artist is the impact the work has on audiences, and other artists. As a director, Sunil has inspired many, many artists across the country. While his work on one hand has focused on unheard voices, Sunil has also brought newer faces to theatre. Since he watches all kinds of theatre across languages, he is able to find talent across these boundaries and give younger artists new exposure and experience of working, as well as opportunities for the future, both on and off stage.
His interest in building audiences and thinking about the responsibility of the art maker to take their work to relevant audiences, have always inspired me. I will share a story here. When Sunil made Cotton 56 Polyester 84 which was about the lives of the mill workers in Bombay, the play traveled to various cities and festivals. It received both critical acclaim and applause from audiences. However Sunil was not satisfied. He felt that the play was not reaching people who it was about – people who work in factories. He then raised the resources to travel with the production to various towns in Maharashtra and performed for the labour communities in those localities. He presented his story to those whose lives were at its heart.
One could say, that any artist who thinks of making an important contribution to their domain would practice some of what I have talked about here. But what makes Sunil’s journey as a critical practitioner more relevant and pertinent is his thinking of the whole ecology of theatre. Going beyond his own work, he feels responsible and accountable for creating a supportive and facilitative environment for theatre. He sees the role of the artist an important one as part of a larger community and society.
After working for many years as the director of the theatre group Arpana, when he felt the need to build new work that was different and required new energies he started another theatre group – Tamaasha – with young practitioners. Soon, this wasn’t enough. The acute lack of spaces for performers to think, rehearse and perform, made Sunil look towards building a physical space in Mumbai – the Studio Tamaasha. And then shortly afterwards, just this space for artists to perform and share their work was not enough for him. Studio Tamaasha announced 10-day residencies for theatre groups to build work here.
This residency today enables many young groups to use the space completely free of cost – which is a dream in a city like Mumbai – and spend time creatively engaging with researching, experimenting with and making work. Sunil has been taking time off his immensely busy schedule to train and mentor many artists. He is always there with an open and interested mind to look at ideas, induce provocations and help in articulations.
The only grouse I have with him is that he does not make time to write about theatre and the arts as much as he used to earlier. I really would appeal to him to write. It is important for young theatre practitioners to understand and learn from Sunil’s vast experiences of being an independent theatre maker in times where scarce resources and hostile attitudes of the current dispensations of power have made it almost impossible for artists to work. Sunil has also been a key member of the group that put together a capacity building programme titled Strategic Management in the Art of Theatre (SMART) that helps groups to think creatively and innovatively about their own sustainability in theatre. And finally, I must mention what makes him particularly critical for us at IFA – supporters of arts and culture projects in India. I have been lucky to have worked with him as an evaluator of the proposals we receive for work in performance at IFA. He has helped us think, reflect, change and learn together as collaborators. He has pushed us to doubt, dig deeper and not be satisfied with responses that make us comfortable. I think we are more enriched and perhaps are learning to be more critical and empathetic grant makers because of artists like him to consult with.
Taufiq Ziad, a poet from Palestine, wrote this beautiful piece:
In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain
like a wall upon your chest,
and in your throat
like a shard of glass,
a cactus thorn,
and in your eyes
a sandstorm.
Here we shall stay,
sing our songs,
take to the angry streets,
fill prisons with dignity.
we shall remain,
guard the shade of the fig and olive trees,
ferment rebellion in our children
as yeast in the dough
The role of the critical practitioner in our times – the artist, the poet, the song maker, the film maker, the photographer and the theatrewallah – I think, is to guard the shades of our fig and olive trees, protect what is being annihilated, made to disappear and become silent by powers that be. It is for them to be that yeast in the dough and ferment possibilities for the future. And that is what Sunil has been for so many of us over so many decades. That is why it is critical that artists like Sunil pursue their practice. And why, perhaps, the Sanskar Bhartis will always be apprehensive of artists like him.
Arundhati Ghosh works and lives in Bangalore. She loves writing in Bangla and can rarely be inspired to do so in English.