'The Politics of Culture Is Also Political': A Profile of Sunil Shanbag

Sunil Shanbag has worn many hats in the past four decades. His style of theatre, incorporating music, history and meta-theatre is being recognised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi's decision to award him.

Zeenat Nagree

In the two weeks between the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s annual meeting held on June 8 in Imphal, where it was decided that Sunil Shanbag was to be recognised for his excellence as a theatre director, and on June 20, when the announcement was finally made public, a controversy regarding Shanbag’s selection gained momentum.

It was reported that the RSS and leaders of the BJP objected to the 62-year-old director receiving the award, owing to concerns about his criticism of the government. In addition, it was said that Shanbag’s deceased sister Anuradha Ghandy’s reported involvement in the Maoist movement tainted his credentials.

Eventually, the attempt to disqualify Shanbag failed and the Akademi refused to change its decision. But these events indicate how political considerations influence those of artistic merit.

To Shanbag, however, the news that he was being considered for the award itself came as a surprise. When questions about his patriotism came up, the idea of accepting the award seemed less fraught. “Then, it became a statement, a recognition not of the work I have done, but what it represents,” he said. Shanbag’s plays over the last decade have dealt with themes like disenfranchisement of the working class, censorship of art and the stifling of dissent.

This November in Mumbai, Shanbag will present his latest production, a reworking of Prithviraj Kapoor’s Deewar, an allegory written and performed in 1945, two years before the partition of the subcontinent became a reality. Kapoor’s play was an attempt to prompt reflection on the kind of nation its audiences wanted to imagine and to stir them towards an expansive vision. Fittingly, Shanbag’s reprisal of the play comes at a time when the populist idea of the nation and the debate around who can or cannot belong to it has little space for dissent.

During its maiden outing, Deewar was subject to censorship by the colonial rule. Referring to the controversy about his receiving the award, Shanbag says, “Isn’t it depressing that between 1945 and 2018, little seems to have changed?”

If Shanbag has been more vocal than ever about the government’s policies, especially in connection with theatre, it is because he sees himself as “an artist who has responsibility”, and with four decades of work behind him, he is certainly in a position to speak. “Theatre is not just about doing a play,” he said. “It is a way of life. You have to start seeing the connections. That is the essence of art.” 

The quest to understand the role of the artist in society has led Shanbag to inhabit several positions – from that of an actor and technician in his early years in theatre to being an organiser and director. He even worked as a journalist, a TV researcher and writer and documentary filmmaker. Finally, using decades of experience in theatre, he has been serving as an archivist and mentor.

A chance encounter

Shanbag’s entry into theatre in 1974 as a 17-year-old was the result of a chance introduction to legendary director Satyadev Dubey. Desperate to find a replacement to play an art-school dropout, Dubey invited Shanbag. Shanbag’s first role thus came to be a marginal figure called Pansy, an aspiring artist at the fringes of society. In the following years, while studying at Elphinstone College, directing street plays with his classmates in the wake of the Emergency, and engaging with the radical leftist ideas of his sister Anuradha Ghandy, Shanbag kept at theatre under Dubey. “Everything happened to make theatre possible,” he recalls of that time.

Satyadev Dubey. Credit: Prithvi theatre.

In interviews, Shanbag is often called upon to recount his experiences of working with a maverick like Dubey, of being in the orbit of his erratic genius and through Dubey’s company Theatre Unit, participating in the experimental theatre movement based around Chhabildas School Hall in the suburb of Dadar in Mumbai.

The narration of Shanbag’s first decade in theatre is a fascination with the guru-shishya system of another era and to a preoccupation with the protagonists of a golden age. Shanbag left Dubey in 1985 and co-founded his own company, called Arpana, a name bestowed on the new venture by Dubey himself.

However, only two decades after Arpana was established did Shanbag arrive on the scene with the 2006 production Cotton 56, Polyester 84. Set in Girangaon, the textile mill district in Mumbai, the play features two former mill workers as protagonists who meet at a newspaper stall and talk about past and present struggles. Much of what is considered ‘trademark Shanbag’ was first employed in this critically acclaimed play.

Rather than work on an existing script, Shanbag began correspondence with playwright Ramu Ramanathan while the text was still under development. Historical research and observation of the present were key to writing the fictional characters. As for the presentation, live music and singing were used as tools of narration. “It took me twenty years to find my own vision,” he said. “What can I say, I am a slow learner.”

Since Cotton 56, Polyester 84, Shanbag’s plays have become interdisciplinary collages in which music features prominently. “Indian audiences versed in folk traditions respond very well to live music,” Shanbag said, whose 2011 play Stories in a Song, conceptualised by Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan, took as its subject the history of musical forms like kajri, thumri, dadra and khayal. “I have used live music in so many plays, I think I should direct something without it now,” he laughs.

A scene from Arpana’s Cotton 56, Polyester 84. CreditL Flickr/Sunil Shanbag. CC BY 2.0

A layered narration

Shanbag also has a penchant for placing plays within plays, using theatre to comment on the history of the form. Walking to the Sun, written by Vivek Narayan, was based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Dak Ghar and an actual incident surrounding Dak Ghar’sperformance in the Warsaw ghetto of Poland during the Holocaust. Shanbag first used layering in the 2009 production, Sex Morality and Censorship, written by Shanta Gokhale, which narrated the court case surrounding the censorship of Vijay Tendulkar’s play Sakharam Binder and commented on the sanitisation of lavani and tamaasha. In all of these works, Shanbag has paid close attention to accurate representation of historical details.

Speaking about the importance of research in his practice, Shanbag said, “I am not a fiction writer and cannot create stories out of my imagination. I need solid material.” However, Shanbag’s work is not entirely documentary – it uses fact to bring verisimilitude to fiction. This approach may be seen as a culmination of his work as a journalist and a TV writer, much before Cotton 56, Polyester 84.

In 1980, Shanbag joined C.Y. Gopinath’s Sol Features, an agency of freelancers where many of the employees were encouraged to undertake what Gopinath describes as “first person journalism.” One of the stories Shanbag remembers doing at the time was impersonating a shoe-shine boy outside VT station in order to write from personal experience rather than use second-hand accounts. “Of course, one questions the ethics of doing that kind of work now,” he said.

Experiences in other media

In TV, as a researcher and writer, Shanbag had to come up with different narrative strategies to tell stories accurately, whether it was the question of how to encapsulate large historical periods into short episodes for Shyam Benegal’s historical drama Bharat Ek Khoj or how to crystallise women’s struggles for legal rights through fictionalised situations in Manju Singh’s Adhikar.

From 1990, Shanbag worked as a researcher on Surabhi, a series that tasked itself with documenting various facets of Indian culture. A significant breakthrough came with the documentary Maihar Raag, for which Shanbag and his collaborator, filmmaker Arunabh Bhattacharjee, won the National Award for Best Non-Feature Film in 1994. “From documentary, I learnt how non-fictional material can be used to construct an argument and it seemed silly that until then, these worlds were separate,” he said, speaking of how his directorial strategies came to be influenced by his experience in other forms of media.

Shanbag’s varied interests, which have led him towards incorporating literature, poetry, music and the history of theatre itself in his work, have at times brought criticism from within the community. “When I did something like Stories in A Song, there were friends of mine who did not see any political aspect about it,” he said, referring to the play’s focus on the history of music in India. “The question is what constitutes the political. The politics of culture is also political. There was a time when these definitions were narrow.”

The importance of dissent

Yet, in the current political climate Shanbag has found himself talking about dissent directly with his 2017 production Words Have Been Uttered, featuring songs, poems, and excerpts of other plays. The description of the play opens with the following line, “Dissenting, or holding an opinion in opposition to a prevailing idea, is an integral part of the Indian tradition in which we accept that there are many ways of looking at and living in the world.” Now, it could even be read as a rebuttal to the arguments used to oppose Shanbag receiving the Sangeet Natak Akademi.

A scene from ‘Words Have Been Uttered’. Credit: Facebook.

Shanbag says that what preoccupies him at the moment is not only his own work but the larger idea of theatre itself. Shanbag has played an instrumental role in documenting an oral history project on historic experimental theatre spaces. This was published in the book Scenes We Made, edited by eminent theatre critic and writer Shanta Gokhale in 2015. The same year, he co-founded Tamaasha, with actor Sapna Saran, the company that produced Words Have Been Uttered. The company’s offshoot, Studio Tamaasha, aims to programme interdisciplinary events. Talking about the financial sustainability of alternative spaces, Shanbag said, “Why do we demand that cultural spaces must be sustainable? Even banks are not sustainable.”

One of the projects he hopes to oversee in the coming months is the mapping of new alternative theatre venues across the country. “I would not mind stepping down from my role as a director,” he said, “It is about enthusing people about the larger idea of theatre.”

Zeenat Nagree is an art critic and curator based in Bombay

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