I set the play in Simla (now Shimla) because I grew up there in the 1950s and I was familiar with its society. I had seen or heard the talk of Rai Sahibs and Amritas throughout my childhood. In time, I set it during the Diwali of 1962 when the country was at war with China. I think this was a great turning point—the war ended our age of innocence and shattered our Nehruvian dreams. Nehru died soon afterwards and our society also began to change. With the coming of Indira Gandhi values began to depart from our political life and governance became more and more immoral. A new personalized style of politics came into being. Institutions started to erode especially in the Congress party.
As the play opens, Ansuya’s family, which has seen better times before the partition of the country, broods over the old days. They are being forced to sell their house to pay off their debts. Ever since her father died, her uncle Karan has been Ansuya’s companion. The noble beauty of his mind draws him to her and they share an idyllic life of books. For Karan too Ansuya’s family is the only one he has known. He is a professor, more comfortable with thought than action. He has not been a success in the eyes of the world, and has reached the twilight when hopes are fast beginning to fade, and life is becoming a constant looking back. He needs his niece more than he realizes but is unwilling to admit his excessive interest in her. She is aware of his feelings towards her and this occasionally bothers her. But Ansuya is really troubled by her static, decaying, mental existence. She yearns for the city where people do things. She feels stifled by her closed life and the incestuous elite that makes up Simla’s society. Into this quiet, desperate idleness comes Deepak, full of energy and ambition, and infects everyone.
This play lay in a drawer, gathering dust for twenty years. When I moved to Delhi in the mid-1990s, I gave it to Bhaskar Ghose, who saw something in it and he persuaded the Yatrik troupe to perform it under the director Sunit Tandon. We held a series of readings and I realized that it needed a fair amount of work. After that it became a sort of collaboration between the Yatrik cast and me. I gave them plenty of room to improvise and they returned the compliment, and I think the play improved.
This has turned out to be a longer introduction than I had planned. I have followed, I find, in the tradition established by Dryden and avidly emulated by Bernard Shaw in which the author weighs a volume of plays with a long preface. The logic seems to have been that if the reader did not get his money’s worth from the plays he might be consoled with a voluminous introduction. Shaw’s prefaces bear only a faint relation to the plays they introduce. They often present the mental climate in which the play came to life—and the mental climate is a significant quality of Shavian playwriting. In this introduction I have attempted to do the same—albeit more modestly—to portray both the historical climate of the times where the plays are set and the mental climate of the times when I wrote the play.
Oxford University Press published Larins Sahib in 1970 in England, and Oxford India brought out my plays for the first time in a single volume in 2001. When Penguin expressed a desire to reissue that anthology ten years later, I was delighted. I have happily updated this introduction. It seems to me that there is no greater compliment for a writer than that someone should want to read you. And when it comes to plays, the greater tribute is to be performed. And I hope that this new volume will lead to many more productions.
July 2011
Notes
1. William Strunk and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
2. Baron C. Von Hugel. Travellers in Punjab and Kashmir. London, 1845, p. 293.
3. Lepel Griffin. Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Barrier between Our Growing Empire and Central Asia. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905, pp. 9–10.
4. J.S. Grewal. The Sikhs of the Punjab, Part 2, Volume 3, New Cambridge History of India. Ed. G. Johnson, et al. Cambridge, 1990, p. 127.
5. M.K. Naik. ‘The Three Avatars of Henry Lawrence: A Study of Gurcharan Das’ Larins Sahib’. In The Literary Criterion 12 (2 & 3). Ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah, 1976.
6. Hume. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. 1931, p. 136.
7. Priyadas’s commentary on Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal, written in AD 1712, has shaped the historical work on Mirabai. There is only one indisputably central association that is known that is linked with her name, namely, that as a woman Mira spurned her caste and family obligations in order to live out a life with Krishna. Nabhadas began his entry on Mira in the Bhaktamal by saying that Mira left her clan ( kul) and society and all notions of decorum in order to worship Krishna. Priyadas’s account of Mira provided two other details which were missing in Nabhadas. One was the fact that she was born in Merta, the other that she was married to the Rana of Chittor. Priyadas then recounted Mira’s refusal to pay obeisance to the Sisodiya goddess ( kuldevi). See Parita Mukta, Upholding the Common Life: The Community of Mirabai, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. It is the best scholarly attempt to come to grips with the biographical material on Mirabai.
8. Parita Mukta, ibid., has confirmed this in her book.
9. Gurcharan Das. India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2002, p. 282.
LARINS SAHIB
Larins Sahib won the Sultan Padamsee Prize in 1968, offered by the Theatre Group, Bombay. It was first produced by Deryck Jeffereis at the Bhulabhai Theatre, Bombay
