If I had to go back and write these plays all over again, I would have insisted on working with a group of actors as soon as I had the first draft of the play. I would have given lots of room to actors to improvise and I would have trained myself to be receptive to what was working on the stage and what was not. I would have learned ‘to listen’ and ‘to see’ what an audience does and a writer does not. I would have learned to be humble and learn from the actors and their improvisational exercises. I realize it is a different kind of work for a writer to write in this manner when he is so used to working alone, but it cannot be helped. The test of a play is how it works on the stage and not how it reads.
But I get ahead of myself. Let me go back to the beginning. I shall first describe how I learned to write, why I became a writer in English, what sort of language English is evolving into in India, and why it is important to use that language in the theatre in order to connect with Indian audiences. Then I shall come back to the three plays.
Growing Up to Write
I grew up in a middle-class Indian family that could afford to give me an education. This enabled me to write and speak in English and exposed me to Western liberal ideas. And so, I found myself in a situation of privilege on the Indian subcontinent. As I grew older I felt it a duty to capture my experiences and articulate them as honestly as I could. My mother taught me that one’s life is earned, earned against formidable odds, and one must somehow try to make some sort of sense out of it. Writing, I have discovered, is one way to do it.
I was the eldest son of an engineer who worked for the government in the Punjab. Our family budget was always tight and after paying for school fees and milk, there was little left to run the house. My mother told us stories from the Mahabharata and encouraged in us the virtues of thrift, honesty, and responsibility. We lived in the innocence of the Nehru age when we still had strong ideals. We believed in socialism, democracy and the United Nations. We were filled with the excitement of building a nation. Even though the dream soured, Nehru’s idealism left a permanent mark on us.
I went to America as a schoolboy for a few years in the 1950s. In my high school I was surprised that we had to attend a class called ‘shop’, which was filled with lathes, tools, and machines, and we learned to work with our hands. We learned to repair a window, make a table or unclog a sink. At the end of the year, we had lost our fear of technology. We had also understood Bronowski’s dictum that the world is understood through the hand, not the mind—‘The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.’ Hence, many Americans become ‘tinkerers’. This is a powerful idea for India where we have traditionally had contempt for manual labour. Tinkerers combine knowledge with manual labour, and thus you get innovation. A lack of tinkering may be one of the reasons we have failed to create an industrial revolution in India.
After completing high school I was lucky to get a scholarship to Harvard University. Because American colleges are liberal, I was allowed to experiment with many subjects, and I had the unbelievable luxury of studying Sanskrit with Daniel Ingalls. I took full advantage of this liberality and took courses in economics, history, literature, and even architecture (because I was fascinated with buildings). Eventually I majored in philosophy and wrote my thesis under the moral and political philosopher John Rawls.
On the day that I graduated from Harvard I knew I would write. I was expected to go on to do a PhD in philosophy (at Oxford) but I chickened out at the last minute. As I lay on the grass one afternoon that summer, I asked myself if I really wanted to spend the rest of my life living in that rarefied stratosphere of abstract thought. I had also begun to feel that the academic life was stuffy and confining. So, I came back home to India instead and, until I could figure out what I wanted to do with my life, joined a company in Bombay which made Vicks Vaporub (and was later acquired by Procter & Gamble). The chief virtue of my job was that it gave me a chance to travel to the smallest towns and villages of India and I had plenty of free time in the evenings. On one such night in Sri Krishna Lodge in Jalandhar in Punjab, I began to write Larins Sahib.
Soon I discovered that I liked the rough and tumble of the commercial world, and the academic world grew remote. And so, like the man who came to dinner, I stayed on. But while my business friends played golf on weekends, I wrote. For the next thirty years I lived an active business life, first in Bombay and later in many cities around the world. During those years, I thought of myself as a manager, not a ‘literary person’. I retained my passion for the humanities, however. I read voraciously in history, philosophy, and art, and I became a ‘weekend writer’. Although my multinational company sent me to work in many countries, I always seemed to come back. I found I could live only in India. I learned from Cervantes when we lived in Spain that glory lies in one’s own backyard. The universal, he says, is at odds with the cosmopolitan. The more a man belongs to his
