Pathologies of violence and the theatircal 'mudra'

This long-read essay is based on the transcript of a talk given at NOT The Drama Seminar, a five-day conclave of theatre people from all over India held in 2008

This long-read essay is based on the transcript of a talk given at NOT The Drama Seminar, a five day conclave of theatre people from all over India, held at Heggodu, Karnataka, from Saturday 22 to Wednesday 26 March 2008. A version of it has been published by Tulika Books, in Our Stage a compilation based on the talks given at the conclave, and the discussions that took place there.

The following is an edited and slightly reworked version of the text published as part of that compilation.

We live at a time when a fascistic mind-set has taken hold of large sections of our society. Fascist, or fascistic, violence is all around us, and in myriad forms: physical, mental, spiritual, legal-judicial, linguistic, and communal. We are always in the midst of it, without noticing it or even knowing it. Most people pretend not to notice it, or not to know much about it, although it impinges on their lives continuously. And even those of us who are anguished about it feel utterly helpless in the face of it. Many amongst us shut their eyes and close off their sensibilities to it, saying they cannot go and physically prevent the fascists, who are today in power, and their mobs, from persecuting, maiming and killing people; and perhaps worse still, from corrupting their minds —our minds —and our hearts and souls.

So, what can theatre people like us do, given such violence, such apathy, such helplessness? All we have are our theatre spaces, if and when we are lucky enough to have places where two or three or twenty of us can rehearse and perform. But, then, that is the only way in which we can, as artists, respond meaningfully to the world: through the fashioning of theatre, theatre that tries to evoke and express a truthful vision of the cosmos. That is all we can do, as artists.

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As a poet and playwright I can write poems and plays. But we know that the power of the word, merely written, can only go that far. However, as a theatre-maker, an actor, I can enact the causes, the pathologies, the symptoms, and the effects of such violence and, through my acting, also perhaps offer some tentative but heart-felt varieties of cure for it. I can thus act against such violence, for enactment of that kind is action too; acting too is praxis. But such acting must be self-aware and, at the same time, selfless. It must be self-effacing, so that what is seen on the stage is a truthful meditation on the world and not an exercise in self-display on the part of the actor.

It is not enough for a theatre person to write lines of text, and to read or deliver those lines, or pretend ever so theatrically to present them. As theatre people, we have to find the right gesture, the right image-in-enactment and enactment-in-image, for whatever is sought to be realised in the text and on the stage. While the image-in-enactment and enactment-in-image must encompass everything that makes for theatre - sets, costumes, lights, music, stage properties, choreography and so forth - the most important thing, the most vital thing absolutely, that would make for that image, is the actor on stage - the acting itself.

The acting is the image. A better name, perhaps the best name, for this image-in-enactment would be - mudra. Now the word mudra can be translated as gesture, but we need to bear in mind that the latter is but poor and inadequate when it comes to resonating the import of that Sanskrit-Indian word. However, the Brechtian term gest comes closer to approximating the rich meaning of it.

Let me elaborate a bit upon the importance of the mudra. I cannot, every time, always, and in so many words and images bring all the violence around me on to the stage directly. Killer-gangs on the rampage that go about burning infants and slashing the stomachs of pregnant women; the violence-in-disguise wrought by bio-technology companies, by mining businesses and lobbies, and by glib and greedy stock exchanges; the all too concrete violence of bombs and of racial-fascist attacks; or, at another level, the creeping, ever-present violence of our loud shopping malls and our giant development projects - I cannot, every time, and always, bring all of this on to the stage documentarily, naturalistically, or even realistically.

What I must do is try and condense all of that into an image, a gest-gesture, a mudra, and also create a distance from it, so that the spectators can carry it home within themselves and reflect and meditate upon it.

For, true theatre seeks not to shock, or titillate, or merely provoke, but to sensitise and conscientise. It is the old, yet ever new and joyful challenge: defamiliarise the familiar; familiarise or demystify the unfamiliar. In other words: cause and evoke estrangement, meditative wonderment and reflection.

The theatre is the only art where the purely human gesture in all its fullness, in terms of voice, speech and body, is of the utmost importance. It is in the performative theatrical gesture, where it is truthful and where it strives to be ever more truthful, that the truest depths, heights and breadth of the human soul can be felt and communicated purely through the medium of human being, and becoming, to other human beings that are present in the performance space live: to see, experience and participate. A theatrical gesture, to be performed with skill and feeling, and with an unsparing fidelity to truth, needs long hours, months and years of practice, of research, of meditation and introspection, not only with regard to its human and social truth but also with regard to its connection with the entire cosmic order. An actor’s being, in the theatre, thus becomes a living repository of the history of the cosmos.

Therefore the need for direction. For the job of the stage director is to relentlessly insist upon finding that right image-in-enactment and enactment-in-image, that mudra, spoken of above. He or she must insist upon doing so, lead the search for it, and the way towards it. The director must sometimes push the people in his team towards it; if necessary, even drag them towards it; and must, with them, finally find it, at least so far as the purpose of the production calls for, and the worldly circumstances of it allow. The director must always be the chief cajoler and coaxer for truthfulness. Directing matters.

This means that I have to indulge in a different kind of reasoning, a different kind of creativity than that which enables a playwright to write. I am moved and shaken by the reality that is around me, and inspired by the written text that is before me, and I ingest it all — certainly. But from thereon, I must give myself to the kind of reasoning that will be the womb of vocal and physical image, of truthful gesture. The quest for truthful theatrical gesture is, in sum, nothing less than the quest for the enactment of being and becoming. The process of this quest in the theatre, I would like to call thick reasoning, a term fashioned in the same way as thick description. Thick reasoning is to reasoning what thick description is to description. Both terms – thick reasoning and thick description – indicate phenomena that are natural to the artist, who is always wary of too much discursiveness and analysis although he, or she, may not, himself, or herself, be incapable of being discursive and analytical to a certain degree.

Thick reasoning leads to theatrical mudra. And the envisioning and discovery, the abhinaya and the presentation of theatrical mudra lead the audience towards a heightened sense of the contours of reality; it nudges them towards truthfully reckoning with their personal-ethical responsibility for social processes — thick reasoning.

Let me give an example. Some years before the Babri Masjid was demolished, I had begun writing a play. After 6 December 1992, I took up the writing of it again, continuing from where I had left before, even as I rehearsed it with the professional company I was working with then, Nataka Karnataka Rangayana, in Mysore.

The play is set in 1929-30, around the time of the Dandi March. The second act of the play is set in a railway station. In those days of the freedom struggle, Gandhi and his lieutenants, in their travels across the country in trains, would often give brief and inspiring speeches from the doors of their railway carriages, and people would gather at railway stations to listen to them.

In the scene that concerns us now - an early morning scene - people from villages around the station gather to listen to such a speech given by Kalikanath Banerjee, a direct emissary of Gandhi. The villagers are led by two well-educated and idealistic young men, one of whom is a government officer. All of this is being witnessed silently by Pippalananda, a saffron-robed monk, who claims to be a disciple of Vivekananda. Pippalananda is an idealogue of what is today called Hindutva.

Banerjee finishes making his speech, and boards the train with his entourage. The train leaves. There ensues a scene of great and furious confrontation between the station master, and the crowd and its leaders. The station master too is a votary of Hindutva, is an admirer of Pippalananda, and is therefore against Gandhi and his movement. There is great commotion, and great shoving and pushing about, and shouting. But finally there is some calm, and the villagers leave for their fields.

The two educated and idealistic young men and a few others stay behind to have their breakfast of raagi rotti and chutney under a big tree in this rural railway station. One young man in this group calls it a picnic, for they have brought their breakfast with them. Pippalananda approaches them and, initially, impresses them with his leonine but kindly demeanour and eloquence. The government officer, in particular, is smitten by him. The picnickers invite the monk to have breakfast with them, and give him a rotti.

In response to an innocuous question by this group, Pippalananda defends the atrocities committed in the past, and in the name of Hindutva-Hinduism, by his fascist disciple, the station master. Then, rotti in hand, he launches into a terrifying, onomatopoeic tirade that describes his Hindutva (his version of Hinduism), comparing it to the peepul tree that engulfs and tears apart any other tree or plant that happens to be growing close to it — all the while in a state of almost demonic trance, crushing, crushing, crushing the rotti in his hand, oblivious to what he is doing. By the time he’s done, the rotti is destroyed and lies in pieces upon the floor; and, exhausted, exhilarated, as if after a sexual ejaculation, he raises his hand: a limp, unconscious Hitlerite salute: and lets it fall.

It is not enough for a theatre person to be able to write the lines that Pippalananda speaks in this sequence. It is not enough for the actor to declaim those lines, however theatrically. What we have to do is to find the right gesture or mudra, the right stance, or bhangi, the right rhythm, or laya, and the right kind of stylisation, or naatyavidhaana - in sum, the right image, the right and dynamic pratimaa that can embody what is sought to be realised and expressed in that scene.

Now, as a director, as a theatre person, I cannot bring to the stage, explicitly and graphically, all the violence that I see around me, including that of the malls (yes, I find malls to be violent, pornographic, obscene and vulgar). What I have to do is to try and condense all of that into one image, and enact that image for the audiences. Even as I enact it, I must also create a distance from it – so that the spectators can carry it home within themselves, and reflect and meditate upon it. Therefore the image, of the crushing and destroying of raagi rotti.

Or take Othello. As we all know, Iago is the villain of the play, and Roderigo, his sidekick. In Act One, Scene Three, after everybody else has left, and the two villains are alone on stage, Iago talks of our bodies (and, by extension, our minds) being gardens, and our wills, gardeners. He talks of how these gardeners can manipulate the gardens by sowing, growing, and reaping from them whatever they want, and of how, he, Iago, can corrupt Othello's mind and destroy him. Here he mentions some vegetables. Very often, in theatrical productions, people cut those lines.

In the production that I directed at the National School of Drama, New Delhi, in 1992, we had retained those lines. And, even as he acted those lines in this scene, our Iago produced a tomato from out of his pocket, and after spewing the vilest kind of hatred for Othello, he proceeded to squeeze the red tomato in his hand into a pulp in a stylised, studiedly deliberate and violent gesture. Even as he is about to do so, Othello and Desdemona enter the stage imagistically, holding Othello’s famous handkerchief open and hanging between them. They place the handkerchief on the stage, beneath Iago's outstretched hand, as he squeezes and reduces the tomato fruit to a pulp. The pulp and the juice fall on to the handkerchief, staining it, and Othello and Desdemona then take up the stained handkerchief and walk away with it slowly, after it is all over. This was a powerful image, and the people who saw the play carried the image in their minds long after the play was over.

Or, take the blinding of Gloucester, in King Lear. No amount of screaming by the actor playing Gloucester, and no amount of blood being shown, would be equal perhaps to the showing of the act, or mudra, of two candles going out at the exact moment that the daggers are thrust into his eyes.

This is how it was done in a production that I directed for Ninasam Tirugata in 1988. As the Blinding Scene begins, and builds up to the moment of the actual blinding of Gloucester, taking place upstage, two actors enter downstage, one coming from the left and the other from the right. They have lighted candles in their hands. As the scene progresses, they walk towards each other in a slow and stylised manner. At the moment of the blinding, they are close to each other, face to face, candle almost touching candle. At the moment Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out, they squeeze the burning wicks of the candles with their finger-tips, literally rubbing out the light, even as Gloucester screams in unspeakable agony, upstage. Even as this is happening, there is haunting music from a flute played live onstage, and one of the musicians slowly holds aloft a golden mask of the Compassionate Buddha. He holds it aloft momentarily and lowers it again, as slowly as he raised it.

As actors, all we have at our disposal are our bodies, and our samvaedana (sensibility), our ability to feel with the other and for the other, and to thereby embody and reflect upon the violence that is born out of all things, animate and inanimate. That embodying and reflecting on the stage is primarily done through the discovery, the evolving, and the showing of mudras, as argued above. The idea of the mudra is very deep and philosophical and is, at the same time, expressive and performative. Much has been thought about it and written about it in our yogic and philosophical literature, and in our performance traditions. But I shall not elaborate upon that here, or upon my own extended thinking and work upon it in the theatre. However, the examples and explanations given above have, I hope, served to illustrate the point I have been trying to make.

One thing more. It is a cliché of artistic and literary criticism that evil is fascinating and attractive and, therefore, more theatrical than the good. However, I insist (and I know I am not alone in doing so) that the good is equally theatrical, if you can show that inside every noble or heroic paatra resides evil as well.

If we do not show the battle between the good and the evil that happens within our breasts, if we only play out the ideal state of being good - a good that is taken to be fully achieved and realised, a good that is taken for granted - we will only be trivialising that same good. If we take our task too lightly, and presume too much in favour of what we take to be the good, we will only end up making evil seem more attractive. That will not do. It is not how good somebody is, but how they came to be good that is interesting and instructive and, ultimately, truly dramatic. It is the calling of the theatre to examine that process, by playing it out and showing it.

Now, all that I have been saying here, about the portrayal of good and evil on stage -- for all of this too, examples can be given, of actual productions and scenes, and of mudras and gestures. But, for that, there will be another time and another place.

(The author is a Kannada poet, playwright and stage director).

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2 I find the term ‘character’ inaccurate and misleading, with its baggage of reductionist positivism and its psychological naturalism.