“I address life first”
NANDINI BHASKARAN
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Gieve Patel’s plays explore electrifying themes drawn from the dark side of life.
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“The tragic vision of life is often misunderstood as dark and gloomy.”
Photo: SHASHI ASHIWAL
POETIC LANGUAGE: Gieve Patel’s plays go beyond mere realism.
To enter the world of Gieve Patel’s plays is to ready oneself for an emotionally shattering experience. There is nothing pretty-pretty or sentimental about women fighting to the death for custody of a child (“Princes”), or when a man with a dreadful eczema woos a much younger, penniless girl (“Savaksa”) or when a successful barrister gets obsessed with his son-in-law (“Mister Behram”).
Dysfunctional families are a staple with playwrights, Arnold Wesker’s “Roots” or many of John Osborne’s works come to mind. But Gieve’s plays go beyond mere realism. Written and performed memorably in the 1970s and 1980s when Bombay theatre was looking for indigenous writing, routine Broadway adaptations having run their course, the plays, which are now available in a new compilation, launched by Seagull Books in early October in Mumbai, are major works, crying out to be staged again.
Rooted in the Parsi context
Gieve’s plays are unique, says eminent theatre critic Shanta Gokhale, because he is perhaps the only Parsi playwright writing about the community in a rural milieu, particularly the middle-class, impoverished Parsi city-dweller coming to a village. But his locales — village and district town in late 19th century Gujarat, with evocations of the city too — constitute “three microcosms of India”, as the playwright points out. So while being rooted in the searing specificity of the Parsi context, he is able to address quite electrifying themes, such as the obsessive nature of love; power, with its numerous perversions; self-delusion and how it cleaves relationships; the way women are mistreated. Further, what makes these plays definitely not soothing is the way Gieve uses language, Gokhale points out. He is a poet, who deploys image and metaphor and ellipses to compose a tragic denouement. “The tragic vision of life is often misunderstood as dark and gloomy,” Gieve says. “But it’s because great plays — from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, Ibsen, Strindberg and Eugene O’Neill — face up to the tragic stature of life itself that they, in a way, free us from darkness.”
Gieve Patel was born in 1940 in Bombay. His parents were from Nargol, a village in Bulsar district, southern Gujarat. His father was from a land-owning family, which gave Gieve access to Warli life, a theme that gains in cadence and centrality by the time he was writing “Mister Behram”.
“The Warli labourers worked on our estate, and that was magical, another kind of life from the Parsi life that I was used to,” he remarks, seated in his studio on Nepean Sea Road, which offers a view of Hanging Gardens’ verdure. He is wary though of looking at any art from the point of view of ‘current issues’. “I address life first — because issues’ will change. What is unchanging is how human beings get involved in these issues and how they interact under circumstances of great strain.”
“Princes” pits two families against each other for custody of a sole male child. Not difficult to identify with, but it is the way it unravels that has the reader on edge. “I think that when human beings live in close proximity to each other, some of their best and worst aspects come to the fore because of the tensions of living together,” Gieve says. “And since life is, largely, such a difficult thing to transact, some of the worst things can happen in human relationships, and this is rich material for a dramatist.”
Language
The language of the play, an intended artifice, is a lapidary mix of Gujarati English, interspersed with literal translation that has been further chiselled to pierce like shards of glass. Emotions run high here and what is spoken mirrors the almost animal violence within. “How can you be taken in! How can you! If we were not around he would take the child in his teeth and carry him off.”
Amid such conflict, which is never black-and-white, “There is also a tremendous amount of love and caring (in families),” the playwright points out. Like the insistence on food? “Yes, yes, absolutely. So then that becomes a backdrop against which the darker forces are seen in stark relief. Perhaps the ultimate heartbreak is this: there is this battle between these two forces happening in the same individual.”
Mister Behram, the self-righteous, reformist lawyer, is quite the guilt-inducing, exploitative ‘parent’ at home, and Nahnu, a Warli youth, who has been taken into his fold, cannot see it. Nothing could say this more dramatically than the opening scene where Nahnu, rechristened ‘Naval’, sees a goat giving birth, as the sun beats down, blinding him and bringing on a seizure: it’s a heraldic image of doom.
In “Savaksa” too, summoning up a single image right at the beginning has the audience flailing about for some assurance of comfort. The central character, a 60-year-old wealthy Parsi landlord, is proposing marriage to an 18-year-old girl without means. The fact of the terrible patch of eczema on his arm is a burr, a blight casting a shadow over his relationships.
There is detailed, moving description in “Savaksa” of a poor man drinking tea with a slice of bread at a railway station. “Focusing on details is very important to me,” Gieve says, “because it is through this that the whole milieu and the life around it are illuminated. You touch universal things not by making large, broad statements but by looking more closely at details. And not trivial details, either,” he qualifies, “but specific details that are telling.”
The ability to observe closely may have originated from his career as a doctor, he laughs, but that’s only the beginning, he adds cryptically, of the long gestation period his work involves. “Things that are important to you remain with you. Then you fashion and refashion.”
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