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Haksar rues the practice of taking the form from the traditional without assimilating the concept or spirit behind the practice.

Photo: S. Gopakumar.

Activist and director: Anamika Haksar is a firm believer in the B. V. Karanth dictum, ‘go back to the folk practitioners.’

Her interest in theatre was a continuation of the early interest she had for the stage and social work. As a collegian it was amateur theatre that sustained her enthusiasm. The training she received at the National School of Drama, and later at the Soviet Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow, where she specialised in direction, equipped her to take up theatre as a career.

For Anamika, the two names she acknowledges as major influences in shaping her attitude, approach and involvement with the stage are B. V. Karanth and Badal Sircar. Being at the National School of Drama with Karanth, and training with the latter for two years in street theatre equipped her to form ‘Nirakar,’ a theatre group using the proscenium and the street for its productions.

Isn’t theatre facing a crunch of appropriate performing space in these times?

“I don’t think that cultural spaces are shrinking. Monetarily, theatre will not die. What is happening is that funds are being handled by corporates and they control the outflow. Naturally these centres decide how the cultural spaces will function in a capitalist economy,” explains Anamika.

The arrival of television and the lure of Bollywood have taken away talent from theatre no doubt, but in smaller places like Bihar there is theatre, and even if the performance levels are not too good they still make a mark, she says. She feels that the trained performer who seeks survival through films should go back to energise and acquaint the little groups functioning in the interiors and thus give back to theatre in a proactive manner.

This symbiotic functioning would prevent the lesser groups from looking up to mainstream cinema as a source for acting inputs and career prospects. When survival is a major personal issue, a working relationship of this kind would benefit both sides – the trained to draw from grassroots experiences, and the local groups to hone their skills.

Touching on the constant conflict between practitioners who seek to use theatre for meaningful communication and those that have popular appeal, Anamika believes that getting a platform is important. Even if it means adopting a sort of “guerrilla tactics,” to get that little space to say what you want and reach it to an audience.

Speaking on her body of work, Anamika Haksar chooses to speak on the last five of her 20 plays – ‘Bawla,’ ‘Raj Darpan,’ ‘Gaon se shahar tak,’ ‘Huriya,’ and Tagore’s ‘Dak Ghar.’ If for ‘Bawla,’ based on Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot,’ she adopted a multilayered approach, in ‘Raj Darpan’ she drew from banned legal material and Raj nostalgia whereas, ‘Gaon se shahar tak’ was a street play that trailed the journey of Bihar migrants to the unorganised sector. ‘Huriya,’ which was staged in Kerala, drew on contemporary issues. What was more important, according to this activist-director, was that the plays travelled all over India.

A firm believer in the B. V. Karanth dictum, “go back to the folk practitioners,” Haksar rues the present practice of taking the form from the traditional without assimilating the concept or spirit behind the practice. In an age which displays an end of imagination particularly among the middle class, theatre has to be kept alive with a continuous exposure to the stories of our past, fables, culture of the body, rhythm, colour, aesthetics and textiles.

“Remind, remind and remind, through theatre, it has to work,” Anamika concludes.

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