Indian Playwright’s Work Staged at USC

By Diane Krieger on November 20, 2009 7:56 AM

Imagine setting out to be Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Tom Stoppard all rolled into one. Immodest as it sounds, that’s the goal Girish Karnad has set himself.

But Karnad - who was at USC in October, thanks to the support of the Visions and Voices program - has something in common with the Bard: He is probably the greatest playwright in his language (Kannada), as well as a popular actor, a prolific screenwriter and a successful film director. (If Shakespeare was alive today, does anyone doubt he’d be making movies?)

Indian theatre is a fledgling art form, virtually nonexistent before 1947, Karnad explained at a well-attended Bing Theatre event produced by the School of Theatre. “The last of the great Sanskrit plays was written in the ninth century,” he recounted. Then came a thousand-year hiatus. “Playwriting stopped in India. Until the 19th century, there are no plays in any language.”

In the last 50 years, a generation of playwrights - with Karnad at the forefront - has taken upon itself the Herculean task of filling the vacuum. Under colonial rule, Indian playwriting revived, but being a purely profit-driven enterprise, “no good plays came out,” in Karnad’s judgment. “Really serious playwriting begins only after Independence,” he said.

Winner of his homeland’s highest cultural honors, Karnad, 71, draws on primary sources ranging from oral tradition and Hindu sacred texts to East India Company archives. “I’m challenged to try all forms,” he said, “because I’m creating an entirely new body, a new living tradition. This is felt not only by me but by other playwrights of my generation. That accounts for the variety of styles in which all of us write: historical plays, musicals. There’s almost a desperate need to create a tradition for the language.” Languages, really. India officially has 29 major ones, though hundreds more are widely spoken.

The occasion for Karnad’s visit to USC was the staging of excerpts from his large body of work. Theatre professor Jack Rowe had teamed with a dozen MFA acting students to present three scenes from different plays.

In Naga Mandala (1993), based on a folktale “told by women, very often illiterate women,” a neglected wife succumbs to the charms of a cobra, magically disguised as her husband. The scene that Rowe staged, however, is from the play’s prologue, in which a storyteller spies on a gathering of gossiping flames. Yes, in Indian folklore, flames can talk. A quaint conceit would have it that extinguished flames don’t die; they rekindle someplace else, to chatter the night away. In Karnad’s prologue, the flames are joined by a long-suppressed story that has at last burst from its teller’s lips. The storyteller coaxes the story to reveal itself, and the drama unfolds.

In the second scene, from The Fire and the Rain (1999), a priest’s wife encounters her old lover, who has returned from the jungle after years of solitude vainly seeking enlightenment. This story is drawn from the Mahabharata, the eighth-century Sanskrit epic poem that is a primary source of Hindu mythology.

In the third scene, taken from a historic play, The Dreams of Tipu Sultan (2000), Karnad re-imagines how the East India Company - with an assist from the future Duke of Wellington - plotted the death of the famous Tiger of Mysore, an 18th-century warrior-prince who kept an intriguing dream journal. Karnad wrote that play - really a teleplay - in English for the BBC, which had commissioned it in 1997, when India celebrated 50 years of independence.

Why these three scenes? “I wanted to show that this is a writer who does not write the same play again,” said Rowe, who collaborated with Karnad in the selection of the scenes. Each scene was introduced by Karnad himself, and the evening ended in a Q&A session led by USC theatre dean Madeline Puzo.

It was Puzo, incidentally, who commissioned Karnad to write The Fire and the Rain for the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, where the USC dean was formerly a producer.

While on campus, Karnad also gave a public lecture titled “Entertaining India: Past and Present,” in which he retraced how the encounter with British colonialism had forever changed the arts in India.

The author is himself a product of both East and West. Born and raised in Maharashtra, India, he studied philosophy, political science and economics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Though English is now his spoken language, he writes mostly in Kannada and is fluent in several other Indian languages.

A barrage of questions greeted him after the staged scenes, which he addressed with characteristic wit. Asked about his preferred narrative structure, he quipped: “In a play, the structure is given: You know that in 19 minutes, the audience will start squirming.”

On a more earnest note, Karnad told the audience: “I’m overwhelmed by this experience. I thought this was just going to be a small student exercise.”

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