Monumental Dilemma

Shahi Paharedar, the Hindi-Urdu play, will begin with Hindi poet, scholar, Uday Prakash's quote – Iss Kahani Mein Utna Hi Itihas Jitna Na ki Dal Mein Namak. Directed by Niranjan Pedanekar, the play will premier on Sunday night at the ongoing Pune Natyasattak, theatre festival.

Originally written by US-based playwright of Indian origin, Rajiv Joseph, Pedanekar bought rights for the play – Guards at the Taj – and its performances too. This is the second play of Joseph's that Pedanekar will be staging for Pune audience. The first one, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo also premiered at Pune Natyasattak last year.

Characters speak

When asked what was it that he liked about Joseph's writing, Pedanekar said, “I was trying to get hold of some plays which could be considered new by our audience here.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was one play which came under consideration. I found it to be extremely exciting because there was a strange mixture of absurdity and imagination and extremely peculiar circumstances under which normal characters behave in certain way. I also found that Rajiv's writing was very immaculate. He had taken several years to write plays; there is certain amount of craft put in there. A lot of plays, especially Marathi, rely on text and the text sounds as if it's coming out of a playwright's mouth and not from that of the character's. So I wanted plays which essentially reflected character's, not the playwright's language. That's what I found in Bengal Tiger... Also, I felt that t I had not explored Rajiv Joseph's writing enough, so I looked at other plays of his. This one, Guards at the Taj, fit the bill. It was rooted in India and Indian circumstances, but also written in such a way, where characters speak like characters, but convey more than they said.

Gained in translation

Pedanekar decided to write the play into Hindi-Urdu, because it made sense to have a play about Taj Mahal in these languages. While he was writing, the director was sure that he did not want to change the play or adapt it in anyway. “But,” says Pedanekar,

“when you translate the play from English into Hindi-Urdu, it becomes a different way of talking; as if the characters have become different. The way Rajiv has written Guards at the Taj, it can be easily be performed by two stand up comedians. When you take it to Hindi-Urdu domain, the humour becomes different, the way the characters carry themselves becomes different. It became something specific in time, history and space, for us in Indian context.”

Commentary on power vs common man

Having said all that, Pedanekar and his team of actors – Suvrat Joshi and Omkar Govardhan – wondered that certain situations, based on an apocryphal story in the play – will fuel a certain thought process. “We then took care to remove the emotional attachment to Taj Mahal and its surroundings through our design. Other productions that I had a look at, had the monument in their stage design. Shahi Paharedar will be staged in such a way, that we make it more generalised. It is less about Mughals and Shah Jehan and Taj Mahal, and more about commoners caught in a web. We will talk on what is duty, creativity, power and how does a commoner relate to all this. The play will have necessary disclaimers and some amount of fact finding too,” he adds.

Would it made sense to have written a new play, in that case, we ask, to which Pedanekar responds, “There are certain advantages of using the context that Joseph has used. If I had changed it, maybe I would have used Statue of Unity, for example. What I thought was that the characters are really interesting, the setting is familiar, but I wanted to concentrate more on the characters and less on the specific political scenario. This is where we have decontextualised it.”

The play has two guards, Hooma and Babu, guarding the monument, on the eve of its opening. Both of them are itching to have a look at the grandiose monument, but if they do, a harsh punishment awaits them.

Experiment in arts

Pedanekar, who is a scientist, says, “Experiment to me, means to make a hypothesis and to see if it is a hypothesis. Essentially, what I try to do, is take techniques, or take dramatic devices and see whether they can be used for a particular set of actors with a particular script, with a some sort of framework. In research, you try to create something that adds to the body of knowledge; an experiment, here, adds to the body of theatrical knowledge. In Shahi Paharedar, we are trying to find out whether the decontextualisation happens or not through our design. This is our hypothesis and it is important for us to find out, if we can do so.”