Habib Tanvir is identified so completely with a theatre that used Chhattisgarhi actors, dialect and narrative material that it is difficult to believe he chose to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. But it was just as well that he did.

Halfway through the course he saw how irrelevant the training was to his idea of theatre. He quit and returned to India after writing and singing his way across Europe with the ultimate aim of meeting Bertolt Brecht, whose theatre he admired. Unfortunately, Brecht died before he arrived in Berlin but Tanvir stayed on to see his plays. It is not by accident that songs have told as much of the story as speech in Tanvir’s plays. In part at least, this was a Brechtian legacy.

When Tanvir returned to India, it was with a dream he had nurtured all through his travels in Europe. He was obsessed with doing Shudraka’s Mrichchakatikam. Its modernism and free-flowing form challenged him. His mind was sparking with ideas contrary to what pundits claimed Sanskrit theatre had been. In Delhi, Begum Qudsia Zaidi’s Hindustani Theatre was willing to back him. Begum Zaidi even translated the play into Hindi for him. Then serendipity took over.

Born in Raipur, Tanvir had grown up with local folk theatre forms like Nacha and Pandavani. On a visit home he watched an all-night Nacha performance and his mind was blown by the superb acting skills of the five actors before him. On an impulse, he asked them if they would go to Delhi to act in Mitti Ki Gadi. They happily agreed. Begum Zaidi was horrified ("Habib, theatre demands young handsome faces, not these strange creatures") but laid the foundation of Naya Theatre, Tanvir’s karmabhoomi (workplace).

Madan Lal, Thakur Ram, Shiv Dayal, Bhulwa Ram, Jagmohan and Lalu Ram became the backbones of Naya Theatre along with Tanvir’s wife and professional partner, Moneeka Misra. Together they tried, failed, tried again to meld the skills, spontaneous energy and instinctive feeling for movement and song of the Chhattisgarhi actors with Tanvir’s sense of narrative flow and overall structure.

"It took me years to discover the simple thing that I should give my artistes autonomy; that I should give them their mother tongue," Tanvir once said in an interview with Prithvi Theatre. "I knew the sweetness of the dialect but I was totally unaware of its communicability to non-Chhattisgarhi people. That is what held me back. And I got bad versions of Hindi and feeble actors because of their self-consciousness. Finally, I said, ‘let’s try this’ and after three years of failure, I got the breakthrough with Gaon Ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damaad and then Charandas Chor." The trick was to use the Chhattisgarhi dialect, allow the actors to improvise and when their movements matched his ideas, freeze them.

The 1974 play, Charandas Chor, became a hit in India and abroad. If the earlier 1954 hit, Agra Bazaar, which could so easily have been a miss, had revealed the possibility of bringing urban actors and rural non-actors together successfully on the same stage, Charandas Chor established a way of bringing together the sophistication of modern urban theatre with the vitality of folk artistes. The method served him well in all his future plays.

Doing plays with Chhattisgarhi actors was not part of the "back to the village" movement that swept in and out of social and theatre circles in India in the ’70s. Tanvir was not chasing folk forms to use as decorative elements, he said. He was chasing folk actors for the specific vitality, acting and singing skills only they could bring to his plays. He wanted to be part of their great cultural traditions and in the process help those traditions and the actors to survive. The actors were paid a salary of Rs 5,000-6,000 a month while Tanvir received Rs 10,000. No written contracts were required. The actors stayed with Naya Theatre till they retired or died because it allowed them to live off their art with dignity. In the village, they were the lowest of the low. On the Naya Theatre stage they were kings and queens.

Habib Tanvir did not believe government schemes could help folk arts. "Government schemes are survey, budget, report on result. Art is not like drought where you can count how many died," he once told me. If folk theatre was to survive, it needed hard work from within, not "uplift" from outside, he asserted.

Tanvir combined a passion for theatre with an uncompromising belief in secular-liberal values and a lifelong engagement with social problems. His most overtly political play, Hirma Ki Amar Kahani, appeared to some critics to be an argument in favour of feudalism against democracy. But Tanvir pointed out that democracy was not all white. It could be used for a fascistic agenda as had happened in Gujarat. Similarly, feudalism was not all black. It had encouraged the arts. In telling the story of Hirma, he was only provoking people to see both sides of the story.

Standing up for your convictions, countering lies, fighting parochialism, meant running personal risks. Habib Tanvir did that when his play, Ponga Pandit, was attacked by the Hindu Right for being supposedly anti-Hindu. Mikes and stones were thrown at him and his actors. But he stood his ground and continued to perform the 70-year-old folk play.

Habib Tanvir was theatre in every sense of the word. His death orphans the art.

(Shanta Gokhale is a writer and theatre critic based in Mumbai. This article was published in The Hindu on June 14, 2009.)

Courtesy: The Hindu; www.hindu.com