Satish Alekar is an experimentative Marathi playwright and his play Begum. Barve is ... done its bit to question the conceptual singularity of masculinity and to.
Stage Space and Space for “Shaded Regions” of Sexuality: A Study of Alekar’s Begum Barve and Dattani’s On a Muggy Night in Mumbai Tripti Karekatti Abstract This paper is based on an analysis of two plays – Satish Alekar’s Begum Barve and Mahesh Dattani’s On a Muggy Night in Mumbai– and argues that both the plays make a stunning use of stage space and dramatic space to comment on the place and space accorded by society to individuals with problematic gender identities. Satish Alekar is an experimentative Marathi playwright and his play Begum Barve is now considered a masterpiece not just of Marathi theatre but that of modern Indian theatre. It can’t be understood without understanding the place of the dominant practice of female impersonation in the history of Marathi theatre. The protagonist Barve is an old actor who in his youth used to play minor female roles in Marathi Sangeet Natak (musicals) and who keeps on sliding into a fantasy life of being the ‘other’- the woman. The play makes a wonderful use of the stage space in conjunction with music, lightening and olfactory devices, to shift between, on one hand, male and female identity, and on the other, between the sensational world of the characters in 19th century Marathi musicals and the world of stark emptiness and victimization of its actors in real life. Mahesh Dattani’s play On a Muggy Night in Mumbai’(1998) is the first play in Indian theatre to openly handle homosexuality. It uses multiple stage levels and lightening to represent realistic/non-realistic spaces and ‘secret private’/external spaces. The external heterosexual space in Dattani’s play is always threatening the private space of “shaded sexualities”. Even if there are some similarities in the way stage space and dramatic space are used in the two plays, there are also some differences such as the way the spatial axis gets linked with the temporal axis in the two plays. Key Words: Hegemonic and deviant masculinities, homosexuality, homosocial space, theatrical transvestism, reconfiguring gender, Marathi musicals, female impersonation, stage space. *****
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Stage Space and Space for “Shaded Regions” of Sexuality
____________________________________________________________ ______ The present paper is concerned with exploring how Indian literature has done its bit to question the conceptual singularity of masculinity and to expose the heteronormativity in Indian society. It is interested in investigating the place and space accorded by post-independence Indian society and theatre to individuals with problematic gender identities. This is done through an analysis of the extent to which two plays by two experimental Indian dramatists - Marathi playwright Satish Alekar and Indian English playwright Mahesh Dattani- dare to cross the boundaries set up by both the societal and theatrical traditions to bring onto stage issues of homosexuality and the complexities of the practice of theatrical transvestism. 1. On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998) The major concern of Dattani’s plays is to bring centre stage the issues regularly pushed to the periphery. On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is exclusively concerned with the complexities of same-sex relationships - the themes of love, trust and betrayal in queer relationships. As McRae says, it is about, “how society creates patterns of behaviour and how easy it is for individuals to fall victim to the expectations society creates.” 1 There are three acts and eight characters in the play: Kamlesh and his bunch of homosexual friends – Deepali, Sharad, Bunny, Ranjit – and Kamlesh’s heterosexual sister Kiran, her fiancée Ed and the apartment security guard. The play is about the insecurities in the lives of these characters, especially of Ed. While Deepali and Sharad are more comfortable with their ‘deviant’ sexuality, the others are not that successful. The first act shows them all gathering for a party Kamlesh has thrown in his attractive flat and ends with revealing that Ed and Prakash (former lover of Kamlesh) are not different persons. In the later acts, tension keeps on building before Kamlesh-Ed secret is finally out. The audience is made to face squarely the hypocrisy of heteronormativity and its encouragement to deceit through the matrimonial institution. Judith Butler when theorising gender, sex and sexuality as performative maintains that the natural seeming coherence is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time.2 Heterosexual society, Dattani suggests, wants everyone to repeat the stylised acts it sanctions. Their repetition establishes the appearance of an essential ontological ‘core’ gender. The play reveals how the closet gays under the pressures of the heterosexual society put up a performance of ‘normal’ sexuality so as not to stand out against the straight, heterosexual man. This is what Ed plans, what Bunny has been always doing and what the straight psychiatrists advice all gays. Sharad reveals this performance while mocking it thus:
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____________________________________________________________ ______ Sharad: All it needs is a bit of practice. I have begun my lessons. Don’t sit with your legs crossed. Keep them wide apart. And make sure you occupy lots of room. It’s all about occupying space, baby. The walk: walk as if you have a cricket bat between your legs. And thrust your hand forward when you meet people . . . And the speech. Watch the speech. No fluttery vowels. Not ‘It’s so-o-o hot in here!’ –but ‘it’s HOT! It’s fucking HOT!’ 3 Dattani forces the audience to ask itself the basic question - Is a subject entirely a free agent who can select her/his gender? As Ranjit says, “Aren’t we all forgetting something? Does Sharad really have a choice? Can he become heterosexual?”4 And if not, what place and how much space does the homosexual get? The play makes brilliant use of stage space to explore the question and project the way homophobic society intrudes and controls the life of the gays. Dattani makes the stage space to stand for interior/exterior space, private/public, secret/open space and physical/mental space by dividing it into different acting areas and different levels. Stage directions at the beginning establish three different acting areas: the private open world, the private secret world and the inner world of thoughts. The inner world of thoughts is subdivided into three different levels enabling the writer to show at the same time three events that happened at three different places and at three different times so that they are juxtaposed, overlap and comment on each other. This ingenious use of stage space achieves many goals and has been much commented upon in critical literature. From the perspective of this paper, there are some other spaces created which are more important: the homophobic neighbourhood outside the flat and the wider world of hegemonic masculinity, and India and England as nations. These spaces are symbolised by different means on the stage, but mostly through the Mumbai skyline visible through the flat: The backdrop of these three acting areas is the Mumbai skyline, engulfing the created world of kamlesh, the secret private space of the bedroom and the deeper space that belongs to the inner thoughts of the characters.5 The play keeps ‘space’ at the centre through playing on its different tangible versions (seat, home, bedroom, neighbourhood, Mumbai the city, India and England) as well as not so tangible versions and metaphors
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Stage Space and Space for “Shaded Regions” of Sexuality
____________________________________________________________ ______ (surroundings, den, bubble, corner, inside, world outside and ‘outcaste’) We first meet Ed when he is fighting in the airport to exchange the window seat for an aisle seat for Kiran. He has no qualms in demanding someone else give up their seat for him. This note of claiming other’s space continues when we learn that for their son’s marriage, the Kapoors in the house next door are using neighbours’ compound causing a traffic jam and nuisance to them. This using of other’s compound is immediately labelled as “[V]ery intrusive” by Deepali. A little later Kamlesh says that when they were together, Sharad “controlled and stifled me till I had to scream for some space…”6 Ed is criticised by others for searching “someone who will help him to escape to the more… acceptable world”7 (p. 100). Reeser while discussing masculinity in connection with space argues that masculinity does not remain a stable construct when a man moves into another space.8 Dattani compares India and Europe as two spaces to live in as gays. Ranjit blames it all on the nation (India) - “You lot will never be able to find a lover in this wretched country!” He finds it easier to live in England and be true to his sexuality. But for others, especially, for Deepali and Sharad, it is an unacceptable solution for they prefer giving a tough fight to create some space for oneself instead of moving to another space where reconfiguring gender can be possible. The debate over correctness of escaping to another nation as a solution continues in the second act: Bunny: You can leave the country, but you can never run away from being brown. You are ashamed of being Indian. Ranjit: That’s really rich coming from a closet homosexual like you! Yes, I am sometimes regretful of being Indian, because I can’t seem to be both Indian and gay. But you are simply ashamed. All this sham is to cover up your shame. Bunny (really hurt): That’s not true. You cannot make me an outcaste both inside and out.9 The case of gays like Bunny is truly of an outcaste both inside and out as Bunny says here. Not only closet gays but also a woman like Kiran, who has now divorced from her abusive husband, feel ‘outcastes’, marked, and ‘watched’ by society. Kiran thinks of invisibility as the strategy to cope with it and Bunny of camouflaging with the ‘normal’ society: “Camouflage! Even animals do it. Blend with the surroundings. They can’t find you. You politically correct gays deny yourself the basic animal instinct of camouflage.”10 Neither of the two strategies are promoted by Dattani, for
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____________________________________________________________ ______ both depend on external norms. Bunny’s suggestion is severely criticised by Ranjit, for he thinks that a closet homosexual prefers camouflaging because he is basically ashamed of himself. However, Deepali is more correct when she says: “It’s not shame, is it? With us?..… It’s fear….. Of the corners we will be pushed into where we don’t want to be.” Through Deepali, Dattani has voiced the core fear of the people with problematic sexualities – the fear of being pushed to the corners, the fear that their little space will be appropriated by the hegemonic sexualities. Ed taunts them thus: Ed: … There are real men and women out there! You have to see them to know what I mean. But you don’t want to. You don’t want to look at the world outside this….. den of yours. All of you want to live in your own little bubble.11 They are truly living in a den, a tiny space as fragile as a bubble. This space, though tiny and fragile, but has material existence and has been painstakingly created. It must be remembered that Dattani has established at the start that Kamlesh’s flat is in upmarket Marine Drive. It is “… beautifully done up in ‘ethnic chick’ fashion….it speaks a lot of its occupant, Kamlesh, and his attempt at creating a world where he can belong.”12 It is clear that Dattani feels the need to establish a firm connection between the possibility of having space and the gays from the affluent society. 2. Begum Barve (1979) The play has two acts and just four characters- Jawdekar- Bawdekar, Barve and Sutradhar/Shamrao. Jawdekar-Bawdekar are two office clerks. Barve was once a female impersonator in a Sangeet Natak company but now sells incense sticks for a living. Shamrao, once a tongawallah, lives with Barve under the staircase of a chawl. The play shows Jawdekar, Bawdekar and Barve play out their impossible fantasies in Sangeet Natak fashion till Shamrao tears them down. It is a complex play and can’t be understood without understanding the place of the dominant practice of female impersonation in the Sangeet Natak tradition. Sangeet Natak is a distinctive feature of Marathi drama. It emerged in the 1850s and evolved in the form of touring theatrical groups –‘compani’/ ‘mandali’. As pointed out by Bhirdikar and Hansen, this theatre was a homosocial space that nurtured the practice of female impersonation.13 The practice continued even after the emergence of mixed and all-women companies.
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Stage Space and Space for “Shaded Regions” of Sexuality
____________________________________________________________ ______ The characters of Begum Barve are certainly not representatives of ‘mediocrity’ as Sathe claims,14 but are ‘little men, marginalised men’ as Bandopadhyay says.15 These little men stand out against the iconic masculinity of Krishna, the hero of many Marathi musicals, with his numerous affairs and magnificence. Jawadekar and Bawadekar are described as ‘harmless creatures’, always unfortunate, without good looks, past their youth, and for whom ‘marriage is out’. They work in the same office and share a room. Barve is described as ‘exceptionally lightcomplexioned, it is a man’s face, but the gestures of a woman’. We first see him ‘polishing an old broken brass lamp’ draped in a rich-gold embroidered stole. The lamp and the stole are relics from the time of Sangeet Natak. Barve still lives mentally in the world of grandeur and music (natyasangeet) of Sangeet Natak. It serves both as an escape from and a defence mechanism against his present agonies of unfulfilled desires, poverty and exploitation at the hands of Shamrao. The lives of the characters are filled with anxieties, voids and yearnings – the fear of losing a job because ‘two clerks have been appointed to the post of one by mistake’ and the heat, the lack of cooling fans, cool water and women in Jawadekar-Bawadekar’s life. Lame Shamrao ‘owns’ Barve just as he had owned Begum, the mare drawing his tonga and has given the same name to Barve. He exploits Barve economically and sexually. Barve, who could get only minor roles in crowd-scenes as female impersonator in Sangeet Natak Companies, has always yearned for greater roles in theatre and understanding companions in life. None of these desires have a chance of fulfilment. However, they take the form of an elaborate fantasy in the play with Barve, the female impersonator, as Nalawadebai, entering the life of the two clerks, marrying Jawadekar and getting pregnant. The fantasy crashes when Shamrao, playing the ‘agent- spoilsport-interventionist’16 as well as the villain in the Sangeet Natak exposes Barve: Shamrao: You are pregnant? You? You-hoo-hoo-hoo! Did you hear that? Nalawadebai is pregnant. You-hoohoo-hoo!Look at his dhoti. Nalawadebai’s ‘dhoti’. Look at this dhoti-wearing woman. Look at this woman, pregnant without a womb. (Shamrao pulls off Barve’s dhoti, revealing his knee-length striped drawers.) Show us where you get pregnant, bastard. Look, look, look. Take a look at Nalawadebai’s knickers! (Barve screams in anguish, struggles, kicks, but won’t let go of the swing…)17
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____________________________________________________________ ______ Alekar uses space adroitly to make a statement not just on the condition of Barve in particular and people like Barve in general, but on the change that has come in the space given to theatrical transvestism and nonhegemonic masculinities in Marathi theatre. This change has to do a lot with the memories of colonial domination and implied effeminacy. History of theatre in South Asia reveals that almost always women have been represented by men. The image of Indian womanhood, the dutiful, demure bharatiya nari that emerged in the nationalist era owes much to the cross-dressed actors who had huge male as well as female admirers. Hansen challenging the old homophobic premise that female impersonators were mere surrogates for missing women argues with evidence that they “were desired, in their own right, as men who embodied the feminine”18. Female impersonators like Bal Gandharva (1889-1975), Jayshankar Sundari (18881967) were not seen as a stigma but as national icons. They were not a minority but a majority class during that time. However, they are not seen in the same light now. The current anxiety regarding cross-dressing and the implications of effeminacy did not exist in the pre-modern theatre. It is an effect of colonial rule. As pointed out by Sinha, Nandy and Chakravarti19, the colonisers characterised Indian men as effeminate and late nineteenth century Indian reformists responded by reinventing a belligerent style of masculinity. The end of theatrical transvestism in Indian theatre can definitely be seen as a victory for the female performer, but it also marks the end of an era of gender ambiguity. Due to the end of this practice, as Hansen contends, A binary sex/gender regime allied to differences of class and caste has displaced the transvestite performer and distanced urban spectators from circulation of homoerotic imagery. 20 The major focus of Alekar in Begum Barve, the present author maintains, is this displacement and its effect on people like Barve (the performer) and Jawadekar- Bawadekar (the audience). Barve is desired by all the other three men in the play. This reconfiguring of their masculinity, especially in the case of Jawadekar- Bawadekar, is caused by the changed context. As Reeser contends, when a man moves to a new context – spatial context like a new country or a non-spatial/projected context like sci-fi space – masculinity gets destabilised as a construct. 21 Sangeet Natak as a homosocial theatrical space providing room for different kinds of masculinities is of course such kind of space. Its later absence can trigger gender reconfiguration. In its absence, Barve has turned as pathetic as the incense stick which “burn[s] away in style. With nary a whine nor a
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Stage Space and Space for “Shaded Regions” of Sexuality
____________________________________________________________ ______ whimper. No protest, no complaint, it will burn away… to bring divinity to God and happiness to the company owner.”22 Barve, for most part of his life is lost in an imaginary world of Sangeet Natak. In this projected space alone it is possible to throw away the constraints of hegemonic masculinity, to reimagine his sexuality and be ‘the other’- the woman. Outside this utopian space, there is no place for him. Masculinity of Barvesque kind can’t be satisfactorily labelled using the existing terms. Barve harps on this lack of space: “I exist only while the lamp exists” and “The night belongs to my lamp. To the organ. To the velvet curtain. To the stole that was once Narayanrao’s [Bal Gandharva’s]”23 This lack of space gets underlined by Alekars’s use of stage. The locations (office, the clerks’ room, chawl and the space under the staircase where Barve lives) present themselves only in verbal evocations and references. The audience is forced to imagine these spaces and so these spaces are as real as the world of grand musicals Barve imagines. Through this strategy, Barve and the audience are brought to the same level. His kind of ‘shaded regions’ of sexuality (symbolised by the swing which neither belongs here nor there) have no space in the current world – they are pushed not just to the corners (like the homosexuals in Dattani’s play), but behind the curtains. They can’t be allowed space onstage. After the elaborate fantasy crashes, Barve says before returning to his material world of exploitation with resignation - “Yes, That’s where we belong, finally, in the darkness behind the curtain”. The play ends with the last natyageet which also zeroes in on the theme of space: Spirit of the Universe, have pity on me/… Take me, your servant, to such a place Where there is no sin, nor worldly worries. Where all is peace and tranquillity.24 At an earlier point in the play, Jawadekar has said about Barve- “What a strange life you live.” But the lives of not just Barve, but also of Jawadekar, Bawadekar and other such ‘marginalised small men’ appear strange, ‘sinful’ indeed to the society bent upon not acknowledging ‘shaded regions’ of sexuality. That’s why Barve prays for a place where he will not be considered a glitch. His question - “How long can one remain in the darkness behind the curtain?” – is very pertinent indeed. Dattani and Alekar by staging the problem of space for deviant sexualities force us to question the established notions of gender subjectivity. The kind of sexuality which Alekar chooses to talk about is
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____________________________________________________________ ______ more oppressed and marginalised than Dattani’s homosexuals. At least the latter have a space – however small, fragile and threatened – but the little men of Alekar have no space at all. Both playwrights weigh destabilisation of masculinity with the man moving to another space or context. Dattani thinks of nation as the new context for this and Alekar the former tradition of theatrical transvestism. Both link the spatial axis to temporal axis – Dattani with memory and thoughts, Alekar with fantasies.
Notes
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Dattani, Mahesh, A Note on the Play ‘On a Muggy Night in Mumbai’, in Collected Plays, by John McRae ( New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), 45-46. 2 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,1999 [1990]). 163–71, 177–8. 3 Dattani, Mahesh, ‘On a Muggy Night in Mumbai’, in Collected Plays (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), 101. 4 Ibid., 100. 5 Ibid., 49 6 Ibid., 62 7 Ibid., 100 8 Reeser, Todd W., Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 193-96 9 Dattani, Mahesh, ‘On a Muggy Night in Mumbai’, 88 – 89. 10 Ibid., 70. 11 Ibid., 99. 12 Ibid., 49 13 Bhirdikar, Urmila, ‘Begum Barve: Natyaparampareche Punarawalokan’, in Begum Barve Vishayee, ed. Rekha InamdarSane (Pune: Rajhans Publication, 2010); Hansen, Kathryn, ‘A different desire, a different Feminity: Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres, 1850-1940, in Queering India: Same Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2002), 163-180. 14 Sathe, Makrand, ‘Satish Alekar- Begum Barve’, in Marathi Rangabhumichya Tees Ratri: Ek Samajik - Rajkiya Itihas, Volume 2 (Mumbai: Popular Publication, 2011) 1174. 15 Alekar, Satish, Introduction to Collected Plays of Satish Alekar, by Samik Bandopadhyay (New Delhi: Oxford University Press.) 285. 16 Ibid, 286. 17 Alekar, Satish, ‘Begum Barve’ in Collected Plays of Satish Alekar. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 346. 18 Hansen, Kathryn, ‘Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres (1850-1940)’, in Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities, and Culture in South Asia, Ed. Srivastava, Sanjay (SAGE, 2004), 100. 19 Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman and the ‘Effiminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Chakravarti, Uma, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past’ in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 27-87. 20 Hansen, Kathryn, ‘Theatrical Transvestism’ , 122. 21 Reeser, Todd W., Masculinities in Theory, 193-96, 212-13. 22 Alekar, Satish, ‘Begum Barve’ in Collected Plays of Satish Alekar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 305 23 Ibid, 304. 24 Ibid, 347
Bibliography Alekar, Satish. Introduction to Collected Plays of Satish Alekar, by Samik Bandopadhyay, 285-288. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bhirdikar, Urmila. ‘Begum Barve: Natyaparampareche Punarawalokan’. In Begum Barve Vishayee, edited by Rekha Inamdar-Sane, 72-83. Pune: Rajhans Publication, 2010. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,1999 [1990]. Chakravarti, Uma. ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past’. In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 27-87. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989. Dattani, Mahesh. A Note on the Play ‘On a Muggy Night in Mumbai’, by John McRae. In Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000. Hansen, Kathryn. ‘A Different Desire, a Different Feminity: Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres, 1850-1940’. In Queering India: Same Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by Ruth Vanita, 163-180. New York: Routledge, 2002. –––, ‘Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati and Marathi Theatres (1850-1940)’. In Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities, and Culture in South Asia, edited by Srivastava, Sanjay. 99-122. SAGE, 2004. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
Sathe, Makrand. ‘Satish Alekar- Begum Barve’, in Marathi Rangabhumichya Tees Ratri: Ek Samajik - Rajkiya Itihas, Volume 2, 1172-1196. Mumbai: Popular Publication, 2011. Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effiminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteetnth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Tripti Karekatti has been teaching postgraduate classes in the Department of English in Shivaji University, India, for the last twelve years. She is currently working on a UGC Major Research Project on Masculinity and Indian Drama.
