Two-day meet to discuss Delhi’s glorious theatre scene

The Raza Arts Foundation and Natrang Pratishthan organised a two-day meet with erstwhile theatre groups of Delhi, to find out what they had done in the past and what they were planning to do in the future. On the first day, we met members of the Delhi Arts Theatre, DAT and of Yatrik. On the second day, we met actors and directors of Abhiyaan and Dishaantar. All four groups were very active in the 70s and 80s and some in the 90s also.

The host, Ashok Vajpayee, welcomed everybody, and set the proceedings in motion by welcoming the DAT troupe members. There was Heer Ranjha of the past, Madan Bala Sindhu and Vinod Nagpal and an even older Heer, Shanno Khurrana. There was Malvika, the costume designer of DAT and of course the the youngest member of DAT, Amba Sanayal who also took on the onerous duty of being the spokesperson and anchor for the group. She herself spoke about the early stages of the DAT where Sheila Bhatia talked about forming the group and of how all the ladies who were dreaming of an independent India, came together with Sheila Bhatia, to form the troupe. Sheila was from an agrarian background and she had grown up with the women peasants in her house. She knew the songs they sang on every occasion, birth, death, marriage, harvesting and sowing, etc.

She brought all this knowledge with her to the DAT. With her was her companion, Hali Vats, who ran a magazine, and was very helpful to her. Besides the singing of two ghazals by Madan Bala and Vinod, the older Heer tried to sing Taheer, but she couldn’t quite manage the upper octaves.

Several members spoke about the people who were patrons of the group. People like Inder Gujral, Kuldeep Nayyar and Muhammad Qureshi among many others who would came to watch the rehearsals of the play Sheila Ji was doing. I fondly remember when she was doing Jaan-e-Ghazal, with Begum Akhtar’s music, and Begum Akhtar herself was staying with Sheila and Hali and she was staying in the same room as we had stayed in. it was amazing how she composed music. I remember Vinod going to her with a ghazal. She just heard it once and she put her hands on the harmonium and the tune was out.

It was the same ghazal that he sang that day by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Madan Bala also sang a Faiz ghazal which she had sung in front of Faiz himself. The second group, Yatrik, had the founder of the group, Joy Michael, Sushma Seth, one of the founding members Bhaskar Ghosh, Avijit Dutt and, Sudesh Sayal who was part of the production team also joined in later. Like Sheila Bhatia’s session which was preceded by a film on her made by Smita Vats, Hali’s niece, Yatrik, also had a session of photographs selected by the other member of the group, Sunit Tandon. He explained that the photographs were taken at the time when Yatrik was committed to do four plays in a month for the Pavilion in Pragati Maidan. From Ayi Bala Ko Taal Tu to the present day, each photograph was worth viewing. Sunit Tandon was the spokesperson for the group but Bhaskar and others were equally voluble.

The Abhiyaan group the next day had Rajinder Nath, the founder of the group as the spokesperson. The other members of the group included, Santwana Nigam, S.M. Zaheer and Dilip Basu, who took over as spokesperson after a while, and Subhash Gupta was also present. Santwana who is recently incapacitated by a Cancer attack and has had to forgo half a tongue, said something very amusing that “I came from Calcutta hoping to get a small part in a play, I could speak Hindi and Bengali both languages but all I got were translations of plays and I am still doing that. I am the glorified adapter of plays from Bengali to Hindi for the group.”

Abhiyaan was the last group preceded by Dishaantar which has also been one of the oldest theatre groups and have been known especially for the presence of Om Shivpuri and Sudha as well, both great actors.

Amongst the founder members besides the Shivpuris there was Ramgopal Bajaj and Mohan Maharishi. B.M. Shah joined them little later and it was his play Trishankoo that I acted in with Banwari Taneja, who is part of the Dishaantar group. It was very interesting to hear Anuradha Kapoor as a spokesperson of the Dishaantar group. She spoke about her early days as an actor as Binni in Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure and it was fascinating to know of the fact that he sat everyday of the rehearsals with Om Shivpuri, who directed the play. This was the beginning of Indian Theatre as we know it today for even groups who were going back to folk theatre during this period. Ghasiram Kotwal by Vijay Tendulkar in a Marathi dialect was written at in the late 70s and done in Hindi immediately after the Marathi one in Vasant Dev’s excellent translation. Ashok Vajpayee announced at the end of the lively and fascinating two day programme, that Raza Arts Foundation is committed ti doing research in the arts very much like the Natya Shodh Sansthan in Kolkata run by Pratibha Aggarwal. He also offered to finance any revival of any of the plays done by these groups.