Post Facto - Beauty is the beast

My Sunday Guardian column for March 1st:

Suchitra Sen

In a sketch that's part of the Tadpole Repertory's superb play Taramandal, a nervous young woman arrives at the office of a Bollywood agent. She nods when asked if she wants to be a star. But she doesn't speak Hindi — and for the most part of her time on stage, doesn't speak at all. The more he talks, the more terror-stricken she looks. Eventually he suggests, not unkindly, that she sign up as a Junior Artist, commonly known as an extra. "It'll be work. And with your looks, you'll get slotted as A-Class."

The aspiring star is played by a strikingly attractive actor, and to hear that fact referenced in the dialogue — "aapki looks" — seems appropriate, even necessary. It both acknowledges her beauty and dismisses it as not being enough. But is it really not enough, one wonders? And suddenly that idea — that beauty isn't all it takes to become a star — begins to seem a little bit like the wishful thinking oftheatre-wallahs. Because in fact, the film industry seems to declaim from rooftops that beauty is all. Talent, if at all it counts, is secondary.

The young Suchitra Sen — then plain Krishna Dasgupta — apparently once sat on a school bench and announced that she would be remembered long after her death. An ordinary middle class girl who was one of nine siblings, and an average student bereft of any artistic talent, all Sen had was her looks. But apparently, that was enough. "She was conscious of her great beauty... and behaved as if she... deserved every bit of the natural selection," wrote Susmita Dasgupta in a thoughtful Facebook note. At the time, a wealthy groom was the biggest prize a middle class girl could expect for her beauty. Krishna got that, too. But her stardom, says Dasgupta, came about because she believed she was meant for bigger things. Beauty was her claim upon the universe. Hindi film star Juhi Chawla recently described entering the Femina Miss India contest when in college. "I knew I was good," she said, but "there were prettier girls in my class and that always kept me grounded."

Women are constantly being rated on grounds of beauty — and rating ourselves, too. The sad thing is that it isn't just those who aspire to be models or actors, professions that overtly reward bodily perfection, who buy into this hierarchy. Seemingly, it's everyone. And that ingrained sense of superiority or inferiority, based on how you think other people think you look, can coexist with an otherwise well-formed intelligence. I was distressed to hear recently of a bright, high-achieving woman being thrilled that a college reunion still rated her among the hottest girls in her batch.

Men are rated on other things: intelligence, talent, wealth, power. Looks, not so much. That criterion, seemingly, they reserve for us. Off the top of my head, I can think of a boy in high school whose unsolicited rating of three female friends as "cute", "pretty" and "beautiful" I have never forgotten. Another male friend introduced someone a decade after college as "one of the hot girls in college". What's worse is the enshrining of this stuff as popular culture — in university fests, college mags and so on. In St. Stephen's College, premier educational institution of the land, it was long considered a "fun" thing for male students to regularly produce "chick charts" — a list of the top 10 "chicks" in college, based on their physical attributes. In 1984, soon after the pogrom against the Sikh community, they produced a "Sardine" chart — the top 10 female Sikh students rated on their looks. Filmmaker Saba Dewan, then a student there, wrote in 2012 of the uproar that followed, the all-out gender wars in which the authorities sided with the male "pranksters" against women students protesting objectification, who were termed troublemakers. St. Stephen's College in the late 1990s, when I went there, no longer had "chick charts", or at least not public ones. But very similar issues existed, and came to a head around "Miss and Mr Harmony". Ostensibly gender-neutral, it was, in practice, a contest of wit for boys, but looks for girls. The gender wars of my time ended with the entry of women into residence at St. Stephen's, for the first time in its history.

Re-watching Imtiaz Ali's Rockstar the other day, I had a moment of shock. Ali — who went to Hindu College himself — had decided that the best way to introduce his Stephanian heroine to us was to show her topping the chick chart. And the only woman we see respond to it says merely, "Dekhna kya hai? Jab tak yeh St. Stephen's mein hai, yeh hi hogi na No. 1". There it was — a thing so many women had fought so hard to get rid of, shorn of all its history, reinstated as instigator of the beauty myth.

A day after that, a friend said to me she identified with much of the rule-breaking fun that Ali's heroines had, but his actresses were too pretty. "They do what girls want, but they look like what boys want." Ah, no surprise there.

Theatre: The Winter's Tale

Two theatre directors add a bit of sparkle (and some masala) to a Shakespearean gem.



When Anirudh Nair first approached Neel Chaudhuri two years ago with the idea that they direct a play together, they didn’t know the collaboration was going to lead them to The Winter’s Tale. Or even Shakespeare. Having cut his teeth on ShakeSoc (as the St. Stephen’s College theatre society refers to itself), Chaudhuri admits, may have dulled his enthusiasm for Shakespeare -- or at least “the myopic reverence that seems to colour everyone's attitudes towards studying and performing Shakespeare”. In any case, says Chaudhuri, he was “dying to work on a Chekhov text”.

The desire to work with a straight-up classic was something new for Chaudhuri. As he put it himself, his trajectory as a playwright and director until now “seems to have studiously avoided any affinity for classical modes of drama and performance”. From the improvised vignettes of Positions (2006) to the rather adventurous Mouse (2008), an unsettling interaction between an ‘actor’ and a ‘director’ which unfolded at least partially in the dark, via the thoroughly remarkable A Brief History of the Pantomimes (2008), right down to the superbly realized Taramandal (2010) (which won the Hindu Metroplus award for playwriting), Neel Chaudhuri’s plays have been about storytelling with a certain economy. Even when the dialogue is absolutely crucial, the dominant sensation you take away from his productions is one of quiet. And even when his starting point has been a well-known text – in Ich bin Fassbinder (2011) it was Fassbinder’s epochal film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, in Taramandal it was Satyajit Ray’s short story about thwarted ambition, ‘Patol Babu, Film Star’ – Chaudhuri’s way has been to push at its edges, or to create narrative echoes for it, never simply to take the text as is.

Nair, on the other hand, has been working a lot with Shakespeare over the past four or five years – on using physical theatre in Shakespeare and also studying original practice (working with the specificities of Shakespearean rhythms, pentameter, how to use the punctuation, and so on). Nair’s Wide Aisle Productions has also been working on a project that takes Shakespeare to schools, and many of the actors who’re part of that project are also part of the Tadpole Repertory. Tadpole, founded in 2009, is a loose confederation of talented actors in concert with whom Chaudhuri has produced pretty much all his plays.

Chaudhuri was excited about what he and the Tadpole actors could learn from incorporating Nair’s physical training and gesture work. So Shakespeare it was. The group decided they wanted a play that had possibilities as an ensemble piece, not centred heavily around one or two characters – this eliminated, for instance, Hamlet and Othello – and something that Indian theatre-goers weren’t likely to be familiar with – this meant Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and The Merchant of Venice were all out. From a shortlist that included The Taming of the Shrew and Pericles, the final choice was The Winter’s Tale.

One of Shakespeare’s later works, the play is split into two: the first half is a tragic tale of jealousy that unfolds in the court of King Leontes of Sicilia, while the second, which opens 16 years later in the kingdom of Bohemia, is exuberant in both its comedy and its romance. “The duality was both beguiling and bewildering,” says Chaudhuri. “It struck us as quite unique – court and country, tragedy and comedy, death and restoration, tyranny and abandonment. After a point it seemed really clear to us that it was a play ripe for all our ambitions.” The production that unfolded amid the astonishingly apt lily ponds and landscaped grassy mounds of Zorba the Buddha in Delhi this March certainly realized those ambitions. The cast moved with marvelous felicity -- from one part of the open-air venue to another, between the play’s inherent binaries, and most admirably, from a never-stiff Shakespearian English to a glorious, mobile Hindustani.

The confidence of that linguistic decision lies at the root of what is most striking about the play. It plays off the duality that already exists, and creates new ones. Tanzil Ahmad’s superb translation is finely attuned to changes of register in the original, recreating both high and low – and within the low, shifting between “the playfully exaggerated, the bawdy and the mundane”. So the trickster Autolycus’s aside to the audience, “If the springe hold, the cock’s mine!” becomes “Idhar phanda laga, udhar murga phansa!!”; the Clown’s exclamation, “I’ the name of me—” becomes “Arre teri!”. There is even room for the occasional Hinglish moment, without it turning into a fetish or a quirk. And whether they are speaking in English or Hindustani, the actors successfully inhabit the dialogue, bringing to their speech the individual accents and styles that come naturally to them.

Despite what anyone might tell you, Shakespearean language takes a while to get used to. And yet when your ear accepts it, it can be more poetic and brilliant than anything you imagined. Nair and Chaudhuri’s production provides the wonderful sense of being at home, both in the language of Shakespeare and in a language a lot of us know but no longer really speak. This is a production that is both absolutely universal and yet utterly located in the here and now of 2013 India. There is something remarkable going on here. As Leontes says at the end of the play, “If this be magic, let it be an art/ Lawful as eating.”

Published in the April-May issue of Le City Deluxe, an international luxury lifestyle magazine that has recently launched in India (and was kind enough to want to publish a theatre-related piece).