Two Hindi productions from Mumbai visited over the last month. In Trāsadi, aRANYA’s first play after several years (see Chuhal), at Kolkata Centre for Creativity’s Ami Arts Festival, Manav Kaul wrote and directed himself as a son hearing of his mother’s death in their home village and returning there, remembering and mourning her. His casual solo storytelling has received unanimous empathy about the loss of a mother, but I did not find it particularly original or extraordinary as art. It reminded me of Makarand Deshpande’s similar heartbreak and regret in Ma in Transit (see my review), and I felt that though the word trāsadi evokes tragedy, nothing in Kaul’s narrative elevated it to the transcendence we expect from the genre of tragedy; this tragedy, with a small t, is what we all suffer when our mothers depart, a human but commonplace rite of passage.
Ironically, the son in the past had repeated his domineering father’s attitudes, disapproving of his mother’s clothing and her relationship with another man. Since he detached himself from her then, his overwhelming grief at her passing doesn’t move as much. Kaul also doesn’t convince fully in conveying the logic of her professed atheism. The only aspect worth taking home is his most commendable determination to pursue his style of spartan staging, for someone so linked to the film industry.
It was heartening to learn that Anamika Kala Sangam, one of Kolkata’s oldest impresarios, have rebooted their theatre programming, but their ill-advised choice of the Painters’ Nathurām Godse ko Marnā Hogā was a goosestep in a disturbing direction. AKS should have done their homework on the drama’s erroneous and volatile content, completely at odds with AKS’s ethos. The Marathi source play, Pradeep Dalvi’s Mi Nathurām Godse Boltoy (1989), was based on Godse’s propagandist court statement published as May It Please Your Honour. But Professor Y. D. Phadke, in his sardonically-titled Nathurāmāyan, showed how unhistorically Dalvi concocted meetings of his hero (with a Muslim police Inspector and Gandhiji’s son Devdas) to fabricate a false narrative. Yet director Bharat Dabholkar introduces it wherever he goes as historical truth.
As a firm believer in artistic freedom, I went to see it, but realized pretty soon that the many people who vilified it over the decades were justified, so I left midway. I cannot waste my time listening to fiction advertised as fact, most despicably and dangerously so when it defends a hate crime and encourages communal prejudice. For the record, the play is structurally mediocre and its production values virtually nil: for the Painter–Dabholkar reputation, a total washout.
18 January 2025