The Play Must Go On

Playwright At the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the present (Gokhale, Shanta)

Maharashtra is the second largest state in India by population, the third largest by area, and the richest by GDP. Maha rashtra, as any Indian knows, means Great Nation; it follows that the Maharashtrians are a proud people. Over the roughly 700 years of their existence as a linguistic entity, they have much to be proud of, in three categories – blazing military glory, a strong cultural and literary tradition, and a highly progressive and reformist society. The three are inter-connected.

The Maharashtrian day in the military sun started with the battle of Salher in 1672; at the very pinnacle, in the mid-18^th century, under Balaji Baji Rao, their dream of supplementing the moribund Mughals as the masters of India looked well within their grasp; but an Afghan warlord smashed that dream to bits on the heartbreaking fields of Panipat, and their very independence came to a crashing end when Baji Rao II surrendered to the British in 1818.

It is no coincidence, says Shanta Gokhale quoting GP Deshpande, that the crown jewel of the Maharashtrian literary tradition, Marathi theatre, came into existence in the years following this abject defeat. Pride had much to do with it.

The fact that drama is born within 25 years of the fall of the Peshwa regime clearly suggests…that the people who had lost political power had now turned to art. This was most certainly a silent protest against imperialism, but more importantly, it was an attempt by the aristocratic class which had brought about its own political downfall, to seek its identity in a new field of activity, and closely re-examine its own face.

The initial plays, written by people like Vishnudas Bhave or Vinayak Janardhan Kirthane, drew their themes from mythology and history, and their audiences lapped it up; theirs was a natural reaction of a society plunged from the heights of empire to the depths of surrender and slavery within a single generation. But their search for self-esteem did not extend to blind glorification of the past, and colonial rule was not without its benefits. It exposed them to world literature, and to strands of Western social and political reform, and the playwrights focused their efforts on closely examining the ills of their own society, provoking furious internal debate, and even, in the celebrated case of Sangeet Sharada, influencing legislation. Patriotism and social reform were two of the cornerstones of Marathi theatre; a third, and a large factor in the popularity, was the heavy use of classical Hindustani music. The urban middle-class was just beginning to take shape in Mumbai and Pune, and the theatre was a one-stop entertainment shop for them, fusing tradition with novelty, and intellectualism with melodrama.

A scene from Tendulkar’s Ghasiram Kotwal