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Abhilash Pillai's Midnight's Children: Performing Politics through Optics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2023
Abstract
Abhilash Pillai's stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (2005–6) introduced a new visual language to Indian theatre, conceiving performance between theatre and cinema. Pillai's work presents history as memory, amnesia and re-remembering within the framework of a multisensorial scenography that largely uses the vocabularies of the Bollywood film industry. The politics of the performance lies less in the thematic than in its optical dynamics, different as they are from both scene painting and the aestheticization of the public sphere. The production shows how theatre experience in a media society may primarily build on the perceptual, but without dismissing text or suspending the cognitive altogether. The visual media are used more as an intervention in politico-aesthetic discourse than as mere technology. As I explain the reasons for the long absence of any scholarly study of the production, I also consider its relevance to the current political scene in India.
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NOTES
1 Alumnus of the School of Drama, Calicut University; the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi; and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), London; Abhilash Pillai is a noted Indian theatre-maker, pedagogue and, currently, director at the Thrissur School of Drama and Fine Arts, Kerala. During his decades-long stint at NSD as professor of acting and direction, he directed many plays in various Indian and European languages. Recognized as one of the pioneers of digital theatre in India, his works draw on a wide array of materials ranging from the traditional and classical to the modern, but their treatment is predominantly modernistic. He connected NSD with the Grand Circus, Kerala, which resulted in a production he directed, Clowns & Clouds. He has also served as executive director, Asia Theatre Education Centre (ATEC), Central Academy of Drama, in Beijing. Pillai has been honoured with the Sanskriti Award 2002–3, the National School of Drama's Manohar Singh Smriti Puraskar Award 2009 and the Kerala Sangeet Natak Award 2012 for his achievements in the field of theatre and performance.
2 The playscript was developed in Hindi by Himanshu B. Joshi.
3 The Royal Shakespeare Company adapted Midnight's Children in 2003, but Pillai had not watched it.
4 Kavita Nagpal, ‘Midnight's Children on Stage’, Sahara Times, 26 November, 2005, p. 34.
5 Pillai shared the email with the author on 27 June 2021.
6 People still remember that Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat when the post-Godhra pogrom took place in 2002, killing thousands of Muslims in the state.
7 Abhilash Pillai, ‘Drama through the Lens’, 18 February, 2007, at www.financialexpress.com/archive/drama-through-the-lens/192210 (accessed 8 July 2017).
8 Ibid.
9 Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘“Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English’, in Ulka Anjara, ed., A History of the Indian Novel in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 119–32, here p. 127.
10 Madhav Prasad, 2007, at www.academia.edu/485968/Realism_and_fantasy_in_representations_of_metropolitan_life_in_Indian_cinema (accessed 27 June 2022).
11 Ibid.
12 Hadjioannou, Markos and Rodosthenous, George, ‘In between Stage and Screen: The Intermedial in Katie Mitchell's … Some Trace of Her’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 7, 1 (2011), pp. 43–59, here p. 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Ibid., pp. 43–5.
14 McKinney, Joslin and Palmer, Scott, ‘Introducing “Expanded” Scenography’, in McKinney, and Palmer, , eds., Scenography Expanded (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 1–19, here p. 5Google Scholar.
15 Mateusz Borowski and Malgorzata Sugiera, ‘Political Fictions and Fictionalisations: History as Material for Postdramatic Theatre’, in Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll and Steve Giles, eds., Postdramatic Theatre and the Political (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 67–86, here p. 82.
16 Giles, Todd, ‘Writing and Chutnification in Rushdie's Midnight's Children’, The Explicator, 65, 3 (2007), pp. 182–5, here p. 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Drawing on Rushdie's use of the word ‘chutnification’, Ralph J. Crane titled a chapter of his book Inventing India (1992), ‘The Chutnification of History’.
18 Standtler, Florian, ‘“Nobody from Bombay Should Be without a Basic Film Vocabulary”: Midnight's Children and the Visual Culture of Indian Popular Cinema’, in Mendes, Ana Cristina, ed., Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disturbing Borders (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 123–37, here p. 123Google Scholar.
19 The Radcliffe Line was hastily and arbitrarily drawn by barrister Cyril Radcliffe in 1947 to partition the Punjab Province and the Bengal Presidency of British India, primarily on the basis of ‘contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’.
20 Santanu Bose, ‘National Identity and Religion’, The Hindu, 10 April 2014, at www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/theatre/national-identity-and-religion/article5894710.ece (accessed 7 August 2018).
21 Bidisha, ‘An Introduction to Midnight's Children’, 26 May 2016, at https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-midnights-children (accessed 8 September 2016).
22 Carol Martin, ed., Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
23 Abhilash Pillai, ‘The Space through Visual Language in Indian Theatre’, PhD dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2012, p. 311, at https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/117728 (accessed 15 May 2017).
24 Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Eszter Szalczer, eds., August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019).
25 While defining ‘Hindu’ as all the inhabitants of ‘Hindustan’, thus subsuming other ethno-religious differences, the champions of the Hindutva ideology continue to pit the ‘bad’ Muslim minority against the ‘good’ Hindu majority.
26 Ana Tasić, ‘Live Video Relay in Postdramatic Theatre’, in Ivan Medenica, ed., Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre Ten Years After (Belgrade: Faculty of Dramatic Arts, 2011), pp. 119–28, here p. 122.
27 Cooke, Grayson, ‘Start Making Sense: Live Audio-Visual Media Performance’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 6, 2 (2010), pp. 193–208, here p. 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Ibid., p. 197.
29 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge), p. 50.
30 Mehr Gill, ‘Explained: The “Philosophy” of Nathuram Godse, and His Admirers over the Years’, 2019, at https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-the-philosophy-of-nathuram-godse-and-his-admirers-over-the-years-6141588 (accessed 7 July 2021).
31 Fifty-nine passengers aboard the Sabarmati Express died in a sudden fire in one of its coaches in February 2002. Those killed in the fire were claimed to be pious Hindu volunteers (kar sevaks) returning from a pilgrimage to Ayodhya and burnt alive by the Muslims in retaliation for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The pogrom that ensued killed thousands of Muslims in Gujarat and continued for weeks and even months on end, making the ground situation more horrific and the truth more elusive. The post-Godhra carnage may be taken as the second major campaign of the far right for India as a Hindu nation that found full sail with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coming to power at the centre in 2014 and reinforced itself with the party's re-election to parliament with an absolute majority in 2019.
32 All citations in this paragraph, up to this point, are from Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 26.
33 McKinney and Palmer, ‘Introducing “Expanded” Scenography’, p. 14.
34 Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 473.
35 Ana Tasić, ‘Live Video Relay in Postdramatic Theatre’, p. 120.
36 Hasan Zeb, ‘Amidst the Spate of Demolition’, at https://thewire.in/law/demolition-anti-encroachment-drives-what-does-the-law-say (accessed 27 June 2022).
37 Tandva-nritya: the dance of destruction that Lord Shiva did to annihilate the universe in order to create it anew.
38 For details see Zarrilly, Philip, The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance & Structure (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1984)Google Scholar.
39 Rushdie, Midnight's Children, p. 373.
40 Foucault, Michel, ‘Truth and Power’, in Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 109–33, here p. 131Google Scholar.
41 Rushdie, Midnight's Children, p. 372.
42 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, pp. 184–5.
43 Todd Giles, ‘Writing and Chutnification in Rushdie's Midnight's Children’, p. 183.
44 Rushdie, Midnight's Children, pp. 530–1.
45 Quoted in Tomlin, Liz, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory, 1990–2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 47Google Scholar.
46 This parade is a popular attraction for tourists from all over the world because of its spectacularity. The evening ‘Beating Retreat’ features two soldiers, one soldier each from the two countries, who take down their respective national flags through a drill that mutually performs more jingoism and hatred than love and cooperation, especially marked by their raising of one leg as high as possible towards each other.
47 Salman Rushdie, ‘Bollywood or Bust: Salman Rushdie on the World of Midnight's Children, Forty Years Later’, 14 April 2021, at https://lithub.com/bollywood-or-bust-salman-rushdie-on-the-world-of-midnights-children-forty-years-later-2/#:~:text=When%20I%20wrote%20Midnight's%20Children,birth%20of%20a%20new%20hope (accessed 7 July 2021).
48 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 114.
49 Citron, Atay, Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon and Zerbib, David, eds., ‘Introduction’, in Citron, , Aronson-Lehavi, and Zerbib, , eds., Performance Studies in Motion (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 1–14, here p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Edwards, Geoffrey and Bourbeau, Marie, ‘Image Schemata: A Guiding Principle for Multi-modal Expression in Performance Design’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 1, 3 (2005), pp. 189–206, here p. 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar.