Control freak in reserved seats

Vultures.

Gidhadhe .

Horrid things.

Vultures.

Gidhadhe .

Not nice, nor adorable.

Simply reprehensible.

Petty-minded beasts — squabbling and squawking at a stinking carcass.

Willing to attack each other over decomposing meat.

Vultures.

Gidhadhe .

Carrion eaters with beady twisted eyes.

Undernourished, greedy, crooked beaks, often covered in blood and gore and guts and bloody eyeballs.

All so revolting.

Vultures.

Gidhadhe .

Most people would prefer to keep a distance from them.

But Vijay Tendulkar didn’t.

He cared for the vultures.

He placed them on stage, in the living room.

The play was penned in 1961. It was finally staged in 1970.

The vultures were Ramakant and Umakant, with their lasciviousness and viciousness, plus their sister Manik’s vulgar sensuality. Tendulkar made a link between vultures and the veneer of morality that prevailed in middle class Maharashtra.

It’s a warped saga of domestic violence; and how Manik copes with her desires and her family.

A bit like Sakharam Binder .

A play due to which Tendulkar became officially associated with sensationalism, sex and violence. Most of Maharashtra was stunned by the wanton display of illicit sex.

After the box-office success of the Marathi film Natsamrat (based on the cult play by VV Shirwadkar), the buzz is that the Natsamrat team will present Sakharam Binder in its celluloid avataar. Once again, with Nana Patekar in the lead.

This is truly the age of post-modernism. Everything and anything goes.

Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal is an official text. So is Jayant Pawar’s Adhantar . Likewise Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy by Pradeep Dalvi and Yada Kadachit by Santosh Pawar are playing to full houses now. All taboo plays.

So? Has Maharashtra been gentrified?

No.

Scratch the surface and the old scars are visible. A case in point is the show at the Bhagat Singh Maidan in Kala Chowkie. It was October 5, 2014. The Lok Shahir Amar Sheikh Janmshatabdi Samaroh Samiti was keen to host a performance in honour of the legendary people’s poet. This being the historic maidan where Lok Shahir Amar Sheikh sang powadas during the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. The aim: to create awareness about labour reforms during the Mill Workers’ Movement.

But the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said no. According to the BMC notice, only playgrounds that were traditionally used for religious functions and public meetings before March 2012 had the approval to host “similar activities”.

The show transpired after some strings were pulled. It was harmless stuff. The show was on. Meanwhile, geriatrics were ambling around the park’s periphery, infants cycling on three-wheelers, DJ music thudded from the vicinity. Yesterday’s radicals were being generally laidback. There was a song or two about the conspiracy of class and caste. By the time the folk legends were ready to growl about life in the boondocks, it was time to pack up.

The situation wasn’t very different at the Vidrohi literary function hosted in Siddarth College, in Wadala, under the eye of the Mumbai police. There was nothing starry-eyed about the event. More plainclothes personnel than a legit audience.

The few hundred who attended the two-day show of songs, performances and plays were keenly aware that the political narrative had shifted. Utopia and idealism are passé. The most potent literary words touted from the dais pointed to the sections of the Indian Penal Code:

Section 143 — Being member of an unlawful assembly

Section 147 — Rioting

Section 149 — If an offence is committed by any member of an unlawful assembly, every other member of the assembly shall be guilty of the offence

Section 323 — Voluntarily causing hurt

Section 504 — Insult intended to provoke breach of peace

The police heard the jeers, the vacuity and the high-minded theories. They were as apologetic as the show onstage. Their presence could be traced to the enactment of the Dramatic Performances Act (DPA) XIX of 1876 by the British Government.

To understand the ebbs and flows of what happens in today’s India, one has to grasp the first scene of the first act.

In the 1870s, two plays were on the DPA radar: Chaka Darpan in Bengali and Malharaoche Natak in Marathi.

The British official who ruled against the plays said:

“I do not know who was the author, or what his motives were, but the work itself was as gross a calumny as it is possible to conceive. The object was to exhibit as monsters of iniquity the tea planters and those who are engaged in promoting emigration to the tea districts — bodies of men as well conducted as any in the empire. These gentlemen… have what is called a Mirror held up to them in which the gratification of vile passions, cruelty, avarice and lust, is represented as their ordinary occupation. I do not know that this play was ever acted, but it is written, and in all respects adapted, for the stage, and it might, for any power of prevention the Government have, be acted at any moment.”

The arguments remain the same.

The 1890s were a turning point. The polemics of patriotism was in the air. Lokmanya Tilak had launched the Sarvajanik Ganesh Utsav (public Ganesh festival) in 1893. The solidarity of Hindus during the 10-day festival became a political tool in the hands of the Indian National Congress. Tilak introduced the melâ , which entailed hundreds of singing troupes and performances. It was Brecht before Brecht became an ism. The mela in outdoor performance spaces provided a solid political message for the masses.

On cue, this form of earthy theatre was under surveillance.

“During the ten days festival,” wrote SM Edwards, the Police Commissioner of Bombay, in The Bombay City Police , “bands of young Hindus gave theatrical performances and sang religious songs, in which the legends of Hindu mythology were carefully exploited to arouse hatred of the ‘foreigner’, the word mlenccha or ‘foreigner’ being applied equally to Europeans and Muhammadans.”

Lokmanya Tilak and his Ganpati melâs became the bad boys of Indian theatre.

Tilak was prosecuted. Maharashtra with its rich tradition of powadas (ballads) was silenced. The chorus and the duffs were muted. The seven-act plays with their allegories and delicious dialectics were imprisoned.

At times the DPA XIX of 1876 proved benign. So, the Government deployed the Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code plus the Bombay City Police Bill of 1898. These laws became an instrument of political coercion.

It was Tilak 100 years ago. It is Ambedkar now.

Lok Shahir and playwright Sambhaji Bhagat says, “The government in Delhi and Mumbai has appropriated Babasaheb Ambedkar. But their Ambedkar mythology is the antithesis of Ambedkar.” Bhagat says that to understand Ambedkar everyone must read Annihilation of Caste . But these are the voices of dissent which are being forsaken by the state. The evolution of DPA along with the law of sedition has been recycled and repackaged. But it’s the same DPA.

It endows the government with methodologies and means to prevent plays that irk the State’s peace of mind. So on one hand the Culture Department will say the show must go on, come what may. On the other, there are the permissions and no-objection certificates and clearances from the cultural secretary; an NOC from the BMC after paying venue charges and deposits; the BMC show department’s NOC; a fire brigade NOC; a PWD electrical and stage compliance report; a note from the collector Mumbai for entertainment tax clearance after pre-payment of entertainment tax; a police station NOC; an RTO NOC; RTO bandobast charges; DCP Zone; Rangbhoomi Permission for script and lyrics; censor board clearance; police station permission in the ward; and 33 other licences.

And so, technically every show in Maharashtra is “illegal”. The State wields that sort of clout.

Q: What’s the way forward?

A: The ultimate trump card in any theatrewallah’s armoury — budmaashi .

Aravind Ganachari, historian and scholar, mentions how in the 1910s “The time between the two acts of a play was used to address the audience on the gospel of nationalism. At times, someone from the audience spoke on the theme of national interest. For example, during the performance of Kanchangadchi Mohana at Thane, Dhonddev Kashinath Phadke, Narayan Atre and Diler Khan, a guard from the GIP Railways, made a speech on the desirability of unity between Hindus and Muslims. Many times, during the intervals, Swadeshi items, books and leaflets preaching nationalism and photographs of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal were sold.”

There are scores and scores of anecdotes about Mumbai’s theatre budmaashi .

There is the delightful tale of the Swajan Hiteishi Natak Mandali (1907) that travelled to Ranibennur and Dharwar, plus Indore and Gwalior with its plays. In addition to the plays, the “drop scenes” curtains with their coded nationalistic graffiti were “a must see”. The messages were simple: “Be patriotic about your country”, and “Don’t import articles from foreign countries” and “Don’t drink”.

These “drop scene” curtains were deployed between two scenes or acts. The audiences loved it. The enforcement officers did not grasp the play within play. The subterfuge continued. It was much later that the DM of Satara confiscated the curtains under Section 42 of the District Police Act.

GB Phansalkar’s mantra after he lost the curtains: Too bad, but we must find another way to beat the system.

This was true 100 years ago. More so, now.

Ramu Ramanathanis a playwright, based in Mumbai