Larins Sahib is a work of youth and betrays a degree of diffidence. My advice to the director (and the actors) would be to work on Lawrence’s motivation. I would try to find ways to explain why such a fine person with ideals crumbles so easily. Hubris explains it only partially. I would try to integrate ‘the three avatars of Henry Lawrence’ as M.K. Naik of Karnatak University calls them.5 These are the enlightened empire-builder, the would-be ‘Lion of the Punjab’, and the cog in the wheel of the East India Company. If you can dig out why Lawrence does what he does, you will create a stronger performance.
Writing Mira
Saints are not interesting for the theatre—only human beings are, and God is ultimately a human problem. But saints are as natural as the sunshine in India and one of the reasons certainly is the influence of bhakti poets like Mira. I grew up in a bhakti-filled atmosphere as a child. My father was a mystic and my mother used to sing Mira’s devotional songs in the mornings. But I went on to receive a secular and liberal education, acquired a sceptical temper, and I found saints deeply problematic. I did not dismiss spiritual experience, but it would take a great deal to make me a believer. At around the age of twenty-five, I began to question what it meant to be a saint, and this led me to write Mira.
Indians believe in three basic ideas: first, the world is sorrow (dukha) and suffering is at the root of existence. This idea has come to us from the Buddha. The second is the notion that our day-to-day world is an illusion, and we must transcend it to find reality. Shankara (AD 788–820) expressed this notion most forcefully. The third is the passionate belief that ‘I’ or my soul can become one with God by unconditional love and devotion. This is the central idea of bhakti. Love has long been a metaphor for religious experience in India. An ancient passage in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad compares the attainment of freedom and enlightenment to the experience of a man in his wife’s embrace. A person, it says, ‘in the embrace of the intelligent Soul [knows] nothing within or without … [H]is desire is satisfied, in which the soul is his desire, in which he is without desire and without sorrow’.6 Tamil saints first popularized the idea of bhakti, and later it spread across medieval India via a galaxy of bhakti saints—Kabir, Mira, Nanak, Tulsidas, Lalla, Chaitanya, Tukaram, Ravidas, and many others.
The chief mood of bhakti poetry is erotic (sringara), as seen from a woman’s point of view, whether in its phase of separation or of union. When Mira addresses love poems to Krishna she adopts the feminine personae of a wife, illicit lover, a woman with a tryst, even Radha herself. Krishna is her god but he is also her lover. The most common sentiment is the pain of separation from the lover and the constant theme is self-surrender of the beloved.
In classical times Indians sensibly pursued multiple ends in life. These were virtue or righteousness (dharma), wealth and power (artha), pleasure and sex (kama), and release or enlightenment (moksha). During the prime of his life a worldly householder (grihasta) pursued wealth, power, and pleasure. Only later in life did he turn to moksha. Thus, in antiquity there was a nice balance in the aims of life and Indian civilization was not as other-worldly as it became later in medieval times when pancham purushartha, the ‘fifth objective’, swept the minds and hearts of men and women. This was love and it supplanted the other goals, becoming the highest, higher even than moksha.
By reaching out to the masses in their everyday languages, the bhakti saints created a veritable social revolution. By offering entry to the lower castes they forced reform on Hinduism and prevented mass conversion to Islam. Since boundless love of God was the only requirement all were rendered equal. By promoting a direct relationship between the soul and God, the bhakti saints eliminated the priests (as Martin Luther did in the Reformation in the West and Buddha did 2000 years earlier). They offered confidence to the poor masses and helped bind together the diverse elements of the subcontinent into a single functioning society. A new form of musical composition also took shape in their songs, which continue to be performed even today in concerts, on the radio and television.
Although saints like Mira subverted the traditional ideals of Indian womanhood and challenged the social order, her mystical love for Krishna did not create the sort of problems for her as Saint Joan’s visions did in the West. Conservative Rajputs thought she was either mad or a liar or a sorceress, but she was not burned at the stake as Joan was.
It is curious that romantic love rose in the medieval West at the same time. Medieval Western society was also rigid and arranged marriages were the norm. Whereas in Europe romantic love went on to become a worldly norm, bhakti in India was absorbed into the reform movements of the nineteenth century and remained an other-worldly phenomenon. Only later in Hindi cinema, from the 1940s, did romantic love begin to spill out into this world and the secular life.
Critics contend that bhakti flowered because Muslim rule prevented most men from pursuing worldly power. Society had become rigid, the caste system more entrenched, and this checked the ambitions and mobility of men. Turning inwards was a natural response, allowing people to accept their unhappy material condition. They argue that bhakti permanently damaged the Indian psyche by making us ambivalent about the value of human action in this world, and this places
