Added to this is the failure of not having a son. She wonders if she has let her husband down in not giving him an heir. She becomes victim to a palace rumour that she is barren. She despairs and in her vulnerability she almost succumbs to her cousin Jai, who secretly loves her and is one of the few who understand her. At this point she turns to her personal god, Krishna, the dark, erotic god of love, and entreats him to give her a son—a natural thing for a lonely woman to do in order to win her husband back. Soon she finds, however, that she is transferring her love to her god and has become victim to a new attachment. The Rana, unable to understand her preoccupation with Krishna, thinks that she has a lover. He discovers, however, that he was wrong, but he begins to think that she is not quite balanced. Others think her strange behaviour may be the result of her barrenness—perhaps, she is possessed.
Mira’s battle to master her insane attachment to her god and her eventual realization that she can master it constitute a fulfilment. In her mastery is her sainthood. From a reality in itself, the image of Krishna has become a symbol of a greater reality beyond her. At last she is at peace. This then is the inner logic for the transformation of a human being into a love-obsessed bhakti saint. I am not quite sure that it works entirely. After all, there are many neglected, barren wives who do not become saints. But at least it is an attempt at understanding what happened to Mira. Most renderings of her story don’t even make an attempt—they just assume that she was born a saint. I find that unsatisfactory. Moreover, saints do not work well on the stage—you have to humanize them. The other theme that I have explored is the tragedy of her husband who has to suffer the pain and misery of this transformation—the price he has to pay, so to speak, so she can become a saint.
While Larins Sahib was in the genre of the ‘well-made play’, Mira could only succeed as non-natural theatre with lots of song and dance. But I had little experience with theatre craft and for months I struggled with this problem. Then, one day my company transferred me to the head office in New York. This was in 1969 when Grotowski was the rage and New Yorkers were mesmerized by his concept of ‘total theatre’. The city abounded in experimental groups. One of these was La Mama, under the able leadership of Ellen Stewart. The enormously successful rock musical Hair had started there. I was completely transported by the possibilities that had suddenly opened up for my second play. La Mama’s approach to my play reminded me of our ‘total theatre’ in the Tamasha of Maharashtra, the Yakshagana of Mysore, the Bhawai of Gujarat, the Jatra of Bengal.
When Ellen Stewart accepted my first, inadequate draft of Mira, I could not believe it. It needed the young Martin Brenzell of La Mama to introduce me to the magic of theatre—to teach me that theatre could be created minimally with the body movements of the actors. Since naturalistic dialogue was out of the question, I began to conceive of Mira as ritualistic theatre and I began to rewrite the play using aphoristic dialogue. Martin Brenzell found equity actors who had been trained by Martha Graham and could also sing. David Walker wrote the music for two musicians and soon we were in business. Setting Mira’s bhajans to American rock music was a brilliant stroke—Mira would have approved.
Directors do not like playwrights interfering with productions. Brenzell’s solution was to hold rehearsals from midnight to five in the morning. Since I had a regular nine-to-five job, this turned out to be an effective strategy. Occasionally, we would meet at 3 p.m. for breakfast (yes, for breakfast!) at his favourite cafe in the East Village and he would fill me in on the progress of the production. Nevertheless, I did go to a few rehearsals and each time I left enthralled. The entire play had been set to music and dance. All the actors were on stage all the time and they made beautiful pictures with their bodies. When Mira said, ‘I am an ant on a matchstick bit at both ends,’ the actors made such a picture with their bodies. The problem was that Brenzell was never satisfied and he would change the picture every night. The actors complained that they felt they were rehearsing a new play every night right up to opening night. In the end, Brenzell’s was an exciting interpretation. Clive Barnes of the New York Times gave it a rave review, and I felt taller by a few centimetres.
There have been many productions since, including Alyque Padamsee’s visual enactment in Bombay with backward and forward projected slides. It was stylish but static. There was even a production in Spanish with a lovely translation by Enrique Hett that was published by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. M.K. Raina’s production with Jawahar Wattle’s music brought back some of the energy, but none has equalled the glory of the La Mama production.
On 9 Jakhoo Hill
After writing two plays based on historic personages, I thought I would turn to contemporary concerns. Hence, my next play is set in more recent times. On one level 9 Jakhoo Hill is about the changing order—the old middle class giving way to the new. Ansuya and her family belong to the old class and Deepak and Chitra to the new. Although this change had begun in the India of the 1960s, when the play is set, it accelerated in
