Tamil theatre: The courage to dream on despite odds

Can a scholarly seminar trigger impassioned memories? Last week in Amritsar, a Sangeet Natak Akademi conference about Indian theatre did just that for me. 

My mother was a Bharatanatyam guru at a prestigious school. But the last book she read before she died in a hospital was not a book on the classical arts. It was the autobiography of a famous early twentieth-century stage actor: TK Shanmugam. Was she revisiting her childhood when 40-50 strong all-male troupes of Original Boys’ Theatre lugged their colossal sets through village and town, performing traditional plays from legend and folktale, providing entertainment, but also stressing moral values? I remembered how mother often sang snatches of the innumerable songs from those plays and recited their overblown dialogues. She had stories about a few women who broke this male monopoly. Balamani headed her own theatre company and strode in from the wings to play male roles — with leather boots, velvet cloak and fencing sword. Those swashbuckling histrionics survive in sepia photographs.

By the 1920s those mythological plays acquired a new, heady flavour: nationalism. My mother witnessed theatre turning into a mirror of social change, demanding political freedom, and freedom from social evils like caste and gender discrimination. 

The threat of being imprisoned for sedition by the British government turned these stage myths into allegories. However, Ravana entered the march of the British band, thundering in English. Rama was Mahatma Gandhi battling to save Sita or Bharat Mata abducted by this demonic head of a foreign power. Sita’s trial by fire was India purifying itself, destroying social evils and economic inequalities to achieve true independence.  

We don’t know if these plays made people join the freedom movement. But we know that no other region in India saw — as Tamil Nadu did — the power of theatre influencing the thoughts and actions of the masses. Inflamed by the ideologies of Dravida identity, reformist playwrights CN Annadurai (called the Bernard Shaw of Tamil drama!), and disciple M Karunanidhi did not write dialogues. They fired cannons and exploded bombs. Theatre became a political weapon, humanist in principle, atheist in belief. From this camp sprang Sivaji Ganesan and MG Ramachandran — the most mythicised actors of Tamil cinema.

By the 60s,Tamils had forsaken theatre for cinema. But two men drew the crowds back. RS Manohar used spectacular sets to play epic villains – his magnificent Ravana and Machiavellian Chanakya are still remembered. Also shooting into fame was a band of brash amateurs, who had nothing to display except themselves in a flood of words. There was little theatre in their satire.  But their rip-roaring farce and needle-sharp wit punctured corrupt politics and politicians as never before. The unlikely hero of this new absurdist comedy was ‘Cho’ Ramaswamy.

Meanwhile, “social drama”, not revolutionary or radical, but a simple chronicle of middle-class struggles, had its following then as now, as has mindless comedy. Hagiographical plays about saintly figures have gained a huge following today — of devotees rather than spectators.

Like all theatres across the world, Tamil theatre today has trouble with sponsorship, theatre space, audience interest, actor commitment, craft skills… But dissent has not been silenced. Street and propagandist theatres are effective in their spheres. There is also niche theatre — pushing boundaries, creating a meta-language, as with Indianostrum, and Veenapani Chawla’s visionary work at Adishakti — both in Puducherry. Most importantly, women’s voices have found powerful expression in Tamil theatre opposing patriarchy, caste/gender discrimination, establishment atrocities and anti-green greed. 

Koothu-p-pattarai, the brainchild of Tamil thespian Na Muthuswamy, was the first theatre group to create an urgent awareness of craft skills in every aspect of theatre. Most of its trainees there have ended up in films. But thanks to Kootthu-p-pattarai, contemporary Tamil theatre discovered its roots in Terukoothu, the folk theatre of the region. This has launched new avenues of thought in modern practitioners, both in their own work and in collaborative ventures with traditional artists.

Theatre may be a stepchild in film mad Tamil Nadu. But no one screens a film as a community ritual! However, the ancient tradition of inviting a group to stage a mythological play as a thanksgiving ritual after harvest, or as a means of preventing drought and disease, continues in villages. And what do you know? The city’s English theatre is trying to do a ‘Tamil theatre’ of its own — turning Tamil fiction into stage plays and using Tamil genres of music and dance as also the folk genres, to shape new forms. 

I think my mother would have been happy to see that Tamil theatre remains afloat, even more to see that despite the odds, theatre workers in Tamil Nadu continue to have the courage to protest, to strive, to hope, and simply to dream on.

Author is a playwright