Interviewer's Note: Girish Karnad (b. 1938, Matheran, India) has been a vital presence in Indian theatre, film, and television since the early 1960s. He writes plays and screenplays in his native Kannada, the language spoken in the southern Indian state of Karnataka (formerly Mysore); directs feature films, documentaries, and television serials in Kannada, Hindi, and English; and plays leading roles as an actor in Hindi and Kannada art films, commercial films, and television serials. He has also been an important national-level administrator, serving as Director of the Film and Television Institute of India from 1974 to 1975, and Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (the National Academy of the Performing Arts) from 1988 to 1993. Karnad's major plays include Yayati (1961), Tughlaq (1964), Hayavadana (1971), Naga-Mandala (1988), and Tal‚-danda (1990); all but the first have been translated into English by the author. As screenplay-writer, director, and actor, Karnad has been involved with such Kannada films as Samskara (1969), Vamsha Vriksha (1971, with B. V. Karanth), Kaadu (1973), and Ondanondu Kaaladalli (1978). He has also written and directed films in Hindi, including Godhuli (1977, with B. V. Karanth; also available in a Kannada version), Utsav (1984), and Cheluvi (1993). Karnad's lead roles in Manthan (1976) and Swami (1978) are among his best in Hindi art cinema. As a playwright, Karnad played a key role in the collective endeavour after 1960 to devise a distinctly Indian, powerfully synthetic theatre that could circumvent the conventions of western realism, expressionism, and theatricalism. His major plays employ traditional Indian narrative materials and modes of performance successfully to create a radically modern urban theatre. Karnad's work as a playwright, screenplay-writer, and filmmaker has been recognized with numerous national awards, including those for best play (Hayavadana, 1972), best playwright (1972), best film (Samskara, 1971), best direction (Vamsha Vriksha, 1972), and best documentary (Kanaka-Purandara, 1988). Among Karnad's plays, Tughlaq and Hayavadana have been widely performed in Europe and the United States, and the 1993 production of Naga-Mandala at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis was the first professional production of a contemporary Indian play by a major regional American theatre. His films have regularly represented India at international film festivals in Asia, Europe, and the United States. The following excerpt is from an interview with Karnad recorded on the occasion of the opening of Naga-Mandala at the Guthrie Theater in July 1993, and published in New Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge University Press, England), in November 1995.
Competing Media and the Profession of Playwright in India
AD: Among contemporary Indian playwrights, you have the strongest life outside the theater, in film and television. Yet over a career that now spans more than thirty years you've always described playwriting as your primary activity and the identity of playwright as a kind of primary identity. I wonder why.
GK: There is no question that I think of myself essentially as a playwright. It may have something to do with the fact that in the small town of Sirsi where I grew up, strolling groups of players--called Natak Mandalis or Natak Companies--would come, set up a stage, present a few plays over a couple of months and move on. My parents were addicted to these plays. That was in the late '40s. By the early '50s, films had more or less finished off this kind of theatre, though some Mandalis still survive in North Karnataka in a very degenerate state. But in those days they were good. Or at least I was young and thought so. I loved going to see them and the magic has stayed with me. Beyond that, I don't know. I would have like to be a poet--I admire poets--but when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two I realized that I would never be one. I think I have been fairly lucky in having a multi-pronged career. You know, I've been an actor, a publisher, a filmmaker. But in none of these fields have I felt quite as much at home as in playwrighting. I have never felt very confident about my films, for instance. But my very first play, Yayati, shows a kind of confidence, a feel for the medium, which surprises me. If I could do that at twenty-two, I must have a gift for it. It's like a sprinter who just knows he can run.
AD: Poets often try and write for the theatre because they feel that it brings them in contact with a larger, live audience, and that poetry is otherwise very isolating. I find it interesting that you seem to see playwriting as a problematic and isolating activity, from which you need to escape into other mediums.
GK: I write slowly, painfully. It's not writing plays that's painful. It's writing itself that I find painful. Therefore I should have liked to have had more time for writing. But I have not been able to make a living from playwriting, and so I've had to take up other things that I enjoy less. I hated acting--certainly I hated acting in Hindi films, but I did it because it was my largest source of income. One can't earn a comfortable living even from a successful play. Take Tughlaq. As you know, it's been enormously successful--critically as well as in performance. Playwrights in the West have been able to retire on such successes--or at least, to devote themselves to that activity entirely. I can't, and that irritates me. The advantage is that the need to earn a living from other sources keeps me involved in the general flow of life. Otherwise one starts repeating oneself.
AD: It's clear from a number of major Anglo-American careers in the theatre that professional playwrights tend to burn out sooner or later. But you are suggesting that one of the conditions of being a playwright in India is that it cannot be a means of livelihood.
GK: Vijay Tendulkar continued as a journalist for a very long time. Badal Sircar was a city engineer. Had he lived, perhaps Mohan Rakesh could have made a living from his plays because of the large number of universities in the Hindi-speaking areas that used his plays as texts. But this is to make a living as a text-book writer, not a playwright! The point is that "modern" Indian theatre emerged under British influence in three cities that were founded by the British and had no previous Indian history--Calcutta in the East, Bombay in the West, and Madras in the South. Naturally their theatre imitated the visiting British theatre groups, and so Indian theatre inherited the proscenium, the system of selling tickets, the thundering curtain line, the stage machinery for spectacular effects, and so on. These cities also influenced the areas around them, and we got the theatre I described earlier as Natak Companies in Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra, and Tamil Nadu. But the North remained totally innocent of theatre. The entire Hindi belt, and the surrounding regions failed to create any urban theatre. With the coming of "talkies," this urban theatre collapsed completely, because movies were simply better at providing the same kind of spectacle and music. There was no worthwhile drama for almost a hundred years, and I'm afraid that includes Tagore. Serious playwrights somehow appeared after Independence, but they were all introduced and staged by amateur or semi-professional groups. Dharmavir Bharati's Andha Yuga is the first really important play written in this century, and that was written as a radio play! He never wrote another play. Even in Maharashtra, which is the only state with any kind of continuous theatre, most theatre people are "part-time" workers. In the mid-80s Indian television discovered soap opera and theatre audiences have all but disappeared, even in cities like Bombay.
AD: Would you then say that there is a single professional playwright in India at the moment?
GK: The only one who depends entirely on playwriting is Vasant Kanetkar. Then there is P. L. Deshpande. But Deshpande is a brilliant comic writer as well as actor and singer, and he's depended quite a lot on one-man shows and revues. I think he's actually written only one original play, but he's still a bit of a rarity on the Indian stage.
AD: You've commented fairly extensively on the effect that one medium has on another, especially in the Indian situation, and especially with the fourfold media of cinema, theatre, film, and video. Since you have practised in all of these media in varying degrees, do you see a significant interconnection between them in your own work? Do you consider them relatively independent activities, or do they "flow" into each other?
GK: What is common to all of them is drama--I mean, human beings pretending to be someone else and acting out a story which is of interest to the viewers. And in that sense, we see much more drama around us today than ever before. This also means that more people are involved in the "business" of drama than ever before. When I was the Director of the Film and Television Institute, I closed down the Acting Course because the graduates were not getting any work. They were all trained to enter the film industry which was dominated by a handful of stars, and new entrants were not welcome. The technicians were also insecure. Then came the soap operas and the television scene changed overnight. Not just actors, but editors, photographers, script writers, directors--everyone found employment. I don't see why one should feel unhappy about that!
AD: Is it that one medium can expand only at the cost of another?
GK: Yes. Ultimately all resources are limited, especially those that support the entertainment industry. There are more films made every year. There are more television channels. But they are all aimed at the same audience--mainly the urban middle class. And here, even apart from the competition between different media, what has queered the pitch is inflation. Bombay and Calcutta at least have cheap, reasonably efficient city transportation. But in Bangalore if a young couple wants to go to the movies, they have to spend something like Rs.75 altogether, excluding the tickets. No middle class couple can keep that going. They prefer to rent a videotape at Rs. 10 and invite the neighbours over for a social evening.
AD: There's one more aspect of the interconnection between the media that I want to bring up. It is possible to take a text--and by "text" I don't necessarily mean anything written or printed--and translate it into another medium. You can film the performance of a play, you can make a film based on a play, you can do television productions of plays which may or may not be videotapes of actual performances. How do you feel about the exchange between the media in this sense?
GK: In that sense, theatre has always been parasitical. It has always drawn on other forms: on epics in ancient India or Greece, for instance, or on folk tales and novels. But the "translation" in these cases involved considerable freedom of interpretation. Indian theatre has fed almost exclusively on the three epics: the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana. Poets like Kamban or Lakshmish, who wrote the epics in Tamil or Kannada, thought of themselves as "translating" the Sanskrit originals, though they also felt free to move away from the original material. The poet himself decided how far he could stray. When Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carri‚re were in India planning their Mahabharata, they wanted me to collaborate with them and that's the first point I made; in India you never reproduce the original epic--you are not supposed to. But Peter had a valid problem: as an outsider, he would not know how far he could stray without destroying the original. He therefore preferred to stick closely to the text of the Mahabharata. Also, only some material translates well into another medium. I can see Tughlaq as a film but not Hayavadana or Naga-Mandala. I find Chekhov "cinematic" because you can imagine the entire film in Bergmanesque close-ups of people talking to themselves. But not the early Ibsen.
AD: Given the expanding audience in India, and its distribution over a large area, do you see this interchange of media as something that should be actively pursued, so that "drama" becomes accessible to a mass audience?
GK: There is a real dearth of entertainment in India. Until television came, the poor people in the cities had only one form to entertain them: the movies. Theatre was beyond their means. The performing arts are really dying out in the rural areas. That is part of the general economic collapse of the rural regions. And radio, movies and television have never really reached out beyond the small town. In that regard, at least, one must welcome video. It's reached into the remotest areas, where people had not seen anything moving on the screen before. The more channels or forms of entertainment that become available, the better it would be for the mental health of our country. After all, all cultural forms have an entertainment aspect--even when they are connected with religion and ritual. As MacLuhan says somewhere, "An art form is only an entertainment form that has lost its audience." That's a very insightful remark. The more forms my work can be translated into, the happier I'll be.