The Theatre of Kanhailal

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The Theatre of Kanhailal

Edited by: Satyabrata Rout

(Kanhailal (1941-2016) is one of the most important director and actor-trainer of contemporary Indian theatre. He has enriched Indian theatre through his regional sprits and simplicity. His production “Draupdi” is a revolution against human torture, agony and pain and remains a master piece in the history of world theatre. Presented below an excerpt from a long interview with the legend in 2015 (a year before his sad demise) as a part of my book on Visual Theatre)

SR: You believe on the inner aesthetics. As a result, you rejected the external glamour in your theatre practices. How you keep yourself away from all these external elements and how much political your theatre is?
Kanhailal: I have been inspired by two theatre personalities; Grotowski and Badal Sircar. Before pioneering his own training system, Grotowski undertook a serious study on Stanislavsky method in Russia. Then he came to India to understand and study Indian theatre. Finally, he went back to establish his theatre laboratory at Poland. He conceptualized a theatre based on ‘sacrifice’, which might have derived from his Christian ideology. But he did not make it obvious. This way he created the concept of ‘Holy Actor’. Badal Sircar is also an important actor trainer, but in a different way. He is a great Indian playwright. His presentation of the middle class life of modern India gave rise to a new theatre language. Sircar wanted to connect with the common man of this country to establish a dialogue with them. So, he rejected the formal presentation and went into the market place, street corners and roads, by stripping out all the theatricalities from his presentations to make it viable for the common man. He made theatre flexible and simple and served it as a need for the society.

            My theatre practices grew up in poverty. In the early seventies, when I started doing theatre in a small village of Manipur, financial crisis was a big problem for us. We do not have any space to rehearse and perform. Therefore, I started my theatre by collecting money from the village people with a promise to present a show in their village locality. We were practicing ‘Poor Theatre’, not conceptually as Grotowski has envisioned but  in a literary sense. Since we did not have money to spend on sets, lights and costumes, we had to depend only on the actors who can only express through a body, mind and voice. I forcefully confined myself to these three essential elements, but my limitation became my strength and I took this as a challenge. I started rejecting the superfluous elements, which seems to me unimportant including the richness of the text. I started looking back to my own traditions and tried to plunder into the richness of my culture, people’s behaviour, various sounds and many diversified and invisible images hidden within them. Our rituals became the source of my theatre, in which I felt comfortable, which is a part of our social life and awareness also.

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           In a ritual the performer and the spectators share a common place, like in a temple, the priest and the devotees. A step ahead to this, even the god, priest and the devotees become one at a particular moment of time and develop an inner dialogue. Spiritually they become one. Here through rituals our senses meet with each other in the spiritual level and we become one. Like in my theatre, a character and the actor are not two; they both are one. Following this concept, I developed my character of the plays, which is an extension of my actor’s body, mind and soul. It develops an organic inner dialogue in the sensory level of the spectators. This is the theory behind my ‘Ritualistic Theatre’. The meeting of the actor and spectator in the level of sensory and the establishment of the organic inner dialogue in between them, which leads both to achieve the spiritual experiences, is termed as ‘Informed body of the spectator’, developed by Jerzy Grotowski. In this way the individual soul can be evoked. But our evocation of the spectator’s soul takes a different path from Grotowski’s method, though the source is the same. He sacrificed all the elements of theatre to bring out the ‘holy actor’ from within the performer, but we sacrifice for the sake of the human being and for the cause of the society. Our society is deteriorating day by day. In order to save the humanity, we need to provoke the society by establishing an inner dialogue with the spectators. My kind of theatre is purely for socio-political context. My actor becomes the voice of the oppressed those who suffer silently in the society. “My ‘Daupadi’ is the eternal voice of revolution of the millions and millions suppressed women of the world, who have been tortured, raped, harassed by the cruel domination of power”. In this context my theatre is a Political Theatre. My purpose of doing theatre is to rouse the audience to the spirit of human resilience. We have taken the privilege to release the silence of agony of the sufferers of the country, to liberate them from their state of mind.

Photograph of the play "Draupadi. Savitridevi in the lead character, Kalakshetra production-2009

    It is very important to go to the heart of nature to revitalize your senses. In the absence of our senses we can’t get cognition. For that it is essential to release our senses through music, dance, paintings, etc. That was the reason why Tagore created an environment for learning at Shantiniketan. Art can’t be flourished in a closed chamber. For that openness is essential. Here one can start a

dialogue with the spirit of the space.

Still from the play 'Pebet', Directed by Kanhailal

Edited by: Prof. Satyabrata Rout