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JAYANAGAR COMPLEX
Images in empty spaces
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When identities are superimposed, it is difficult to tell which is the symbol, the fragment, and which is the represented, the whole, the one in question
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ARTIST'S TRAGEDY Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime
There have been two interesting stage experiments in Bangalore in the recent past. Both qualify as genuine experiments that call for comparative comment because of their similarities. The earlier work, Suryakanti, is a Kannada play adapted by A.M. Prakash from a biographical story on Vincent Van Gogh by Nemi Chandra; the other is Odakalu Bimba, an original play by Girish Karnad. They were both staged recently at Ranga Shankara.
The curious similarity is that A.M. Prakash is an artist himself and his work is about one of the greatest artists in European history; Karnad, a celebrated author, writes about a fictitious Indian English novelist. Prakash and Karnad have themselves directed the respective plays and both are about fragmented images. It could be argued that the times we live in, especially in cosmopolitan India, with a neurotic obsession with identity and recognition, beg engagement with the theme. This indeed is the season of shattered identities.
Making it
The urgency of the narratives come from the pressure of Time, that with the capital T. How to get recognised quick — to riches, respect, and Page 3. What is true source of the artistic genius? And, to ask the wanton Muse, why does the sacred wind blow so random and bless some, but not others; sometimes, but not when expected; and get noticed or ignored?
In Karnad's play, recognition itself becomes a complex issue. There is a Kannada writer of short stories, Manjula Nayak, who suddenly becomes rich and famous with the publication of her single novel in English. The true authorship of the novel is attributed to Manjula's deceased sister, Malini Nayak, a cripple when alive, who was close, uncomfortably close, to her brother-in-law, Manjula's husband. Her death, that moment in Time, becomes the trigger for Manjula's professedly unintentional plagiarism, the discovery of it by her husband and the subsequent estrangement of the couple, the publication of the novel, and the fame and neurosis that follows it.
Even if Manjula and Malini are metaphors for a fragmented personality, a debate outside the purpose of this analysis, the complexity of recognition, needs to be dealt with. Is the novel itself in the ownership dispute actually good? Does Mediocre Manjula recognise the worth of Malini? Can foreign publishers and literary agents tell good Indian stuff from the bad Indian stuff? Or is Manjula's husband and conscience-keeper the symbol of true self worth, or really the lack of it?
In Prakash's Suryakanti, the French symbolist Paul Gauguin drops in for a conversation with a whole Vincent who is not fully disconnected with Time and its demands and the world at large. He says, in argument, that Nature itself is incomplete. Fragments are arranged for the scene to suggest a whole house, like ironic counterpoints. Are the fragments of the house set incomplete? Or, does the imagination of the audience complete it? The recognition of one should ideally create the recognition of the other.
But in Karnad's play, the difference between the one and the other itself blurs. When identities are superimposed, it is difficult to tell which is the symbol, the fragment, the other, and which is the represented, the whole, the one in question. In a typical Karnad device, a moment of separation to tell one from the other is magically devised: the television image of Manjula Nayak takes independent form. In the inevitable resolution when Manjula is consumed by the magical image, what continues to be a puzzle is the question of which is real, which the illusion. Recognition is impossible without the difference.
Prakash, in a novel experiment for the Kannada stage, refuses to even attempt a resolution of this complexity. He has, for his purpose, three Van Goghs on stage. There is a Van Gogh trapped in the running tie of the play, who must complete what is considered by some to be his last painting, Wheat Field With Crows (July 1890). He must do it, before Time runs out. There is the troubled Van Gogh, the fixed image of a tortured soul, fixed in an instant for all time. And the "whole" Van Gogh, in Prakash's light irony, watches his troubled fragment and arranges parts of a painting, like a jigsaw puzzle, for a self-portrait. For Prakash, recognition cannot be achieved externally. The artist, the man and his image are all within.
So, for all those that are troubled by issues of identity and recognition, the two plays pose more challenges. When foreign literary agents, cosmopolitan critics and Page 3 editors recognise a crippled muse and render it to a recognisable public image, the question of true worth remains unanswered. Who is which? When history renders a miserable, half-mad artist, who sold only one painting in his lifetime, into the image of `The Artist,' the questions become even more uncomfortable. The publisher in London bestows largesse upon undeserving Manjula, Van Gogh's paintings hang on the halls of the museums of the rich and powerful and the Muse wanders, independent, untouched, outside the borders of the singularity that is Time.
The questions are troubling, because in the new urban spaces, "ultra-cosmopolitan spaces," as a globetrotter in Mysore puts it, the image of the self is hugely compromised. The face on Page 3, the suddenly rich, the giant flyover pose more challenges than what traditional parameters of success — position, income or even social standing — ould address. If Page 3 could determine true social standing; foreign publishers, Indian literary genuis; and wealth creation by new-age companies, real Indian economic progress, it would all be just fine. But they don't. Malini is dead. So is Van Gogh. Other artistes strive — as urban dwellers, salaried employees, self-conscious amateurs. Which is the self though? Which language, which community, which society?
Send your feedback to prakash@cfdbangalore.ac.in.
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