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OCTOBER 2012
PRABUDHHA JIVAN
JAINA DARSHANA AND MANOJ SHAH'S THEATRE It's all Apoorav Khela, Wonderful Play
Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based film theorist, curator and historian. He is also an avid theatre watcher. A number of articles on Jainism penned by him have appeared in The Speaking Tree column of The Times of India
Playwright-director-producer Manoj Shah's four plays dealing with Jainism include Apurva Avsar (about life and times of Srimad Rajchandra; premiered in 2007), Jeete Hai Shaan Se...! (on animal cruelty, 2008) Vastupal Tejpal (two brothers who built the Dilwara Temple; 2008), Siddhahem (about the great Jaina grammarian-scholar Acharya Hemchandracharya; 2010) and Apoorav Khela (about Jaina saint-poet Anandghanji; 2012). Over a period of time, these plays have been staged in various parts of the country and abroad. These proscenium plays in Gujarati language besically invoke the Jaina tattvajnana (philosophy) and hence draw audiences largely from Jaina communities wherever they are staged. Needless to say, for the art of theatre that brings flesh-and-blood impersonating bodies on stage, such invocations are extremely difficult to realize.
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Of these plays, I found Apurva Avsar theatrically significant for its use of space (theatre is a highly spatial art unlike cinema which is (temporal) and the use of whiteness-through white cotton, fabric. This enduringly imaginative whiteness, I thought, made the play austere and meditative, not as a prop. Siddahem does succeed in celebrating the scholarship and the austerity in its pristine proscenium beauty but somehow I found Vastupal-Tejpal quite simplistic and a bit loud. Apoorav Khela had, I suppose, the biggest challenge in enlivening the character of Anandghanji about whom barely any information is available. Again the challenge was to invoke the meditative aspect of the play and how to transfer the experience on to the audiences-all through the proscenium space and within that space the human bodies acting, the character of Anandghan in the crucial centre. The great ascetic Anandghan becomes significant in our times (or in all times) because he is a cliche-breaker, he is the one who could cross boundries and accept religious wisdoms from anywhere else, he is the one who is against narrow and parochial sectism, he is the one who could embrace poetry and music so easily and with lightness
of being. He is a spontaneous poet who wrote padas and could interprete agamas. To bring Anandghan on stage in itself is a chalengingly courageous act, I would believe.
However, my first experience of the character could not accept him in his entirely, finding him much too loud and rough in his bodily movements (bhangima), which I thought a trained dancer would have personified the character better, with more softer and saumya gestures. Throughout his abhinaya disposition on stage, there are dancing (along with singing) gestures a lasya of sort, which at first sight I found a bit ungentle. But then considering his avdhoot state I could better contextualise his historionics the way they were imagined by Manoj Shah.
Talking about the theatrical aspect of tatvajnana, I think Manoj Shah's journey had begun with Akho, a medieval Gujarati poet about whom he had produced and directed a play in 2004 and since then he increasingly turned towards Jaina darshana; he being a Jaina himself. Nevertheless, one fear that I foresee in such plays is about the audiences who are obviously religiously devoted ones, who go to theatre with a certain sense of reverence and not with the expectance of the deeper thatrical experience-through its spatial invocations. But yes, we cannot negate the holistic power of theatre-it has to have its impact, and a lingering one. I think for cinematography (the French flimmaker the late Robert Bresson uses this term as a higher function of cinema, a transcendental one) it is comparatively easier to evoke such an experience or deeper anubhooti. But theatre has own privileges, too.
All said done, perhaps first time in the history of Gujarati theatre, there is such a strong body of work that articulates Jainism through proscenium theatre in tis different faces. I only wish that such body of work reaches non-Jaina udiences (including scholars) in some way or the other.
Amrit Gangar
