The Saturday Story | The making of Ranga Shankara

September 30, 1990. Shankar Nag was in his Fiat 118NE, accompanied by his wife Arundhati and daughter. The family had set out the previous night, excited about Jokumaraswamy, the fantasy folklore play Shankar had taken up for a film adaptation. They were headed for Belagavi. It was 5 am, and the car was racing on the highway near Anagodu, near Davangere. A lorry loaded with metal sheets had stopped on the incline. The car collided with it, ricocheted, and hit a tree.

That was how Shankar’s intense, dizzyingly busy life came to an end. He was just 36. Kavya suffered some bruises, and Arundhati was injured in the leg. The tragedy left the family, and his legion of fans, devastated. Shankar had been on the cusp of big things. He had already worked with some of the biggest names in arthouse cinema and bagged two National awards, directed the ambitious Rajkumar Kannada film Ondu Muttina Kathe, and won wide acclaim for helming the TV series Malgudi Days. He had also acted in about a dozen commercial Kannada films. One of them, Auto Raja, had endeared him to auto drivers across Karnataka, and made him their icon. To this day, auto stands are named after him.

A good 34 years on, as we stand at the entrance of Ranga Shankara, a woman auto driver walks up to Arundhati and seeks a picture with her. She has watched all of Shankar’s films, and her phone ringtone is Naguva gulabi hoove, a hit song from Auto Raja that rues how a rich ‘smiling rose’ has let down the auto-driver hero.

“They don’t hesitate to show their love,” says Arundhati, as she poses with the woman. Over the years, by virtue of being Shankar’s wife, Arundhati has seen how such steadfast fandom works. On many occasions, auto drivers ferry her around the city happily, refusing any fare.

The idea of Ranga Shankara emerged in the traumatic days after Shankar’s passing. “We were sitting around in Ambarish’s house in J P Nagar when his friend Ashok came around with a newspaper in his hand,” she recalls. An ad said the BDA had earmarked a site for a theatre, and called for applications. The applicant had to be a trust.

The theatre group Sanket, founded by the couple and their friends in 1979, became a trust in 1992, and applied.

Before Arundhati and Shankar made Bengaluru their home, they had worked in Bombay theatre. “Bombay already had Prithvi theatre. I had worked with Jennifer (Kapoor) when it was conceived and built. The city had a sprinkling of theatres. There was Shivaji Mandir, Ravindra Natya Mandir, and Shankar was from the Chhabildas Movement, which worked from a municipal school. When we came to Bengaluru, we saw that there was just one Ravindra Kalakshetra,” she says.

It would take a theatre group about three months to get a slot in Kalakshetra, and three or four shows in a year was good enough for the Kannada groups active in Bengaluru. But coming from a city putting up shows round the year, Arundhati and Shankar found the going slow. “We were familiar with a robust commercial theatre in Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi,” says Arundhati, who had acted in many of them. In fact, she had met Shankar at one of the rehearsals in Mumbai. The two had plunged into theatre when they were just 16.

Bengaluru venues such as Ravindra Kalakshetra, which opened in 1963, and Chowdiah Memorial Hall, which opened in 1980. were rented out for everything, from dance, music and drama to political and government events. Chowdaiah was open even to general body meetings. “That was why we thought of a venue that would be dedicated to theatre,” says Arundhati.

But was there an audience for round-the-year theatre? Shankar and Arundhati began in Bengaluru with Kannada translations of popular Marathi plays. They were given a hall in Malleswaram, where they staged ‘Sandhya Chaya’ and ‘Nodi Swami Naavirodu Heege’ for 25 days without a break. “We got about a hundred people for each show,” Arundhati says, and that convinced the couple that the Bengaluru audiences were ready for theatre without a break.

Shankar then approached the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat, where their group had performed Girish Karnad’s ‘Nagamandala’, and sought permission to formalise the electrical connections for regular outdoor shows. He proposed a similar arrangement to Suchitra Film Society in Banashankari. Neither organisation was inclined. Arundhati believes that was because they thought the film influence would come in through Shankar, “whom they only saw as a matinee idol”.

The idea of a full-fledged venue for theatre was emerging when Shankar was suddenly gone. “It took me a year to find my bearings,” says Arundhati, who went back to Mumbai and was confined to a wheelchair for nine months. The first year tribute to Shankar was a Kannada adaptation of Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’, with Arundhati playing the protagonist. “We were not the shraddha, puja-doing, types,” she says. “And the theatre community came together and did three plays that Shankar had always wanted to do.” The other two plays were Peter Shaffer’s ‘Royal Hunt of the Sun’, adapted as ‘Surya Shikari’ with 50 actors, and ‘Taledanda’, an original Kannada play by Karnad with 25 actors. The theatre groups Nataranga and Prayogaranga stepped in to help her pull this off.

That was when Arundhati and Surendranath decided they didn’t want to do anything from the past. They had to create something new, and so would look for new plays. But then, creating something new on stage was one thing, and creating a physical space for theatre was quite another.

Suri’s story

Surendranath, popular as Suri, had graduated from the National School of Drama, Delhi, and had just returned to Bengaluru from Kerala, where he had been studying, with the help of a scholarship, the state’s theatre traditions. He met Shankar in 1982, when he was directing the musical ‘Aata Bombata’, and joined the production to do its lighting. “Shankar was shooting in Chennai then. He would fly to Bengaluru, rehearse with us till 12, and leave at 4 am to catch the first flight to Chennai,” he recalls. The group didn’t know whether Shankar even caught any sleep, but his energy was infectious.

Suri then became closely associated with Sanket, and has remained with Ranga Shankara since its inception.

Determined pitch

“I am not a believer, but I think the stars conspired,” Arundhati says, looking back at the early days. “I was just an actor, an ordinary person who wanted a theatre.” She was not politically connected. She didn’t know people in business who could fund a theatre. Eventually, many people passionate about theatre came together to make it happen. “I became the poster girl because I had no other distractions,” she says. “Karnad was busy with his own life, and Suri was away in Hyderabad for 14 years, working for a TV channel.”

Arundhati hails from a family with no background in theatre, and spent her early days in Mumbai and Delhi. Her father was an aeronautical engineer, hailing from Kolar. The family had a Kannada speaking neighbour, and the two men indulged in friendly banter using the choicest abuses. That was her only exposure to Kannada before she came to Bengaluru. It took her a couple of years to become fluent in the language.

“Girish, Ramesh Bhat, S Parameshwarappa (who had served as principal chief conservator of forests), Suri and I became the trustees,” she says. Some in the Bengaluru theatre community were sceptical even in the middle of all the excitement — the plan of a round-the-year theatre space seemed like a daydream. But the city’s theatre groups rallied around, and directors like B V Karanth and Nagabharana were convinced she had it in her to accomplish her dream.

Once the BDA allotted the site, the challenge was to find the money to build the theatre. Arundhati went around seeking donations. Theatre groups joined her, “singing songs and playing the tamate” for Ranga Shankara’s fundraising shows. “It was seven years of fundraising and three years of building,” says Arundhati.

S M Krishna, then chief minister, picked up the phone and called Jindal, and told them to provide the cement for Ranga Shankara. “They sent 75,000 bags of slack cement, which takes longer to set,” she says. The government gave Rs 50 lakh in two instalments.

Bengaluru’s problem was that it had large halls for small audiences. Rents were high, and it was difficult to fill up the seats. What Ranga Shankara did was to recognise the need for an appropriately-sized theatre. “In RangaShankara, even if you have 100 people, it looks full,” Arundhati says. The hall seats 310, and boasts excellent acoustics.

When the construction began, M S Sathyu took architect Sharukh Mistry to Mumbai and showed him the theatres there. “I used to shoot from Sathyu’s shoulders,” she says. “And he was my guru… he had directed my full-length play, in Urdu, for IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association).”

Ranga Shankara had defined itself more sharply than other halls. “And it was well priced,” says Arundhati. The rent was Rs 2,500 a day when it opened, and the theatre hasn’t raised it even by a rupee in 20 years. Suri jokes that the rent is as little as what you would pay for eight packs of cigarettes. “All our rules and regulations were intended to encourage amateur Kannada theatre,” Arundhati says. Amateur, as in non-professional, non-company drama, theatre.

Big splash

Ranga Shankara was inaugurated with a 45-day theatre festival. Bengaluru had about 50 groups, and 45 of them presented plays for the opening. The city has about 150 groups now.

The biggest achievement of Ranga Shankara is that it has averaged a mind-boggling 400 shows a year for 20 years. It stages one show at
7.30 pm on all days except Monday, and two shows on Saturdays and Sundays, when its afternoon shows begin at 3.30 pm This is a world record, says Suri, although Arundhati is shy to stake a claim to it. Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah are among the well-known names that have performed here, but Ranga Shankara is not star-struck, and invites big names only if their work is in keeping with the theme of a festival. “They come for the same Rs 25,000 we give others,” says Arundhati. “Everybody in India knows that Ranga Shankara is not a commercial institution.”

Every year, Ranga Shankara organises a theatre festival. Curating it is not easy, but it seeks to invite the best in the business, so that the theatre community here gets to watch it. The core team calls up friends in Mumbai, Delhi and other centres before deciding whom to invite for the festivals. The curation has largely been successful, but for a couple of wrong calls. “We thought George Orwell couldn’t be messed up, but he was,” says Arundhati, laughing at the thought of how a production fell flat. The curators also watch videos. Earlier, they would read reviews in the press, but few papers now run theatre reviews. That is something that bothers Arundhati. “When I read the papers today, I see four papers dedicated to sports, and not one to culture,” she says.

Before Bengaluru became India’s information tech capital, it was a city of public sector undertakings, and hundreds of people working in factories and banks were active in amateur theatre. IT folks, Arundhati feels, are not as invested in culture. When she comes back from abroad after watching their productions, she is sometimes disappointed that our standards don’t match them. But then, when she thinks of how our cast and crew do theatre with no support from the government or big business, her heart swells with a newfound respect.

About 70 per cent of all plays in Ranga Shankara are in Kannada. Long-running plays such as ‘Mukhyamantri’ and ‘Mysuru Mallige’ still draw in big crowds and plays rich in comedy and quick repartee are popular. A discerning audience can make a difference, challenging groups to attempt complex productions, Arundhati says.

And we need more young playwrights. Many talents are engaged in writing TV scripts, and they should realise, Arundhati says, that plays last way longer than TV scripts: “Kalidasa has lasted to this day!” Karnad was fascinated by mythological characters, even if plays like ‘Anju Mallige’ and ‘Bendakalu on Toast’ were set in contemporary times, and Chandrashekar Kambara’s idiom is steeped in folklore. Some new playwrights have emerged, but theatre needs writers who can represent the new Bengaluru, Arundhati agrees. “We need a shake-up,” she says.

Arundhati hopes the IT companies do more for culture in the city. They could set up small theatres on their campuses and open them up for everyone on the weekends, she suggests.

As Ranga Shankara looks at succession, Arundhati lists two principles that should guide whoever holds the reins next: excellence and generosity. “While it is important to maintain quality, we shouldn’t use it as an excuse to keep people out,” she says.

(Ranga Shankara’s 20th year theatre festival features 20 plays and opens on October 10.)