The Loss of Wor(l)ds: Theatre in Manipur and Heisnam Kanhailal
Trina Nileena Banerjee “The child, I looked at the new born child crying. I noticed that the whole body of the child cries. But actors only use a certain resonator. Actors do this because we are socially and culturally conditioned. […] what we need is the creation of a new body culture…” —-Heisnam Kanhailal, interview with Naveen Kishore and Biren Das Sharma for the Seagull Theatre Quarterly in January, 1996.[i] —————— During a recent student production staged with much fanfare in a reputed auditorium in New Delhi, the audience (consisting mostly of young, elite college students) broke into peals of laughter every time the multilingual actors spoke in Tamil or Meithei, but watched courteously enough when English or Hindi was spoken on stage. Watching the audience as much as I was watching the actors on stage, I begun thinking of what, if anything, had changed from the time when, many decades ago, in 1963, Kanhailal Heisnam had been expelled from the National School of Drama on for having taken leave without official permission. The real problem, according to scholars like Rustom Bharucha (who studies Kanhailal’s theatre in exhaustive detail in his book The Theatre of Kanhailal), [ii] was Kanhailal’s inability to cope with the pressure of being expected to speak, write and work in English and especially in Hindi. These were languages that were unfamiliar and alien to him, just as he was alien in the space where he had arrived, albeit with much hope and optimism, as a student of theatre. Having been expelled, after a period of aimlessness, Kanhailal returned to Imphal finally in 1969 to begin his own work and established his theatre group Kalakshetra Manipur. However, unlike the far-more spectacular Ratan Thiyam, who even went on briefly to become the director of NSD in 1987-1988, Kanhailal remained for a long time on the margins of what was accepted and celebrated as ‘Manipuri ‘theatre practice at the nation’s centre. As a student of Kanhailal’s work, one is tempted to trace his special relationship to language and his long-lasting rejection of ‘words’ as an effective medium for theatrical communication, to this early experience of linguistic exclusion in the nation’s capital. Kanhailal’s experience is significant precisely because it is not merely personal; it is significant in that it can stand as emblematic of the systematic and enduring political, cultural and linguistic exclusion of the North Eastern states from the mainstream cultural history of India. The terms of cultural ‘participation’ are handed down from above; the inability and (god forbid) the choice not to participate might end in ridicule, failure and ostracisation. Kalakshetra Manipur, by the very nature of its austere premises situated at the outer-most limits of Imphal (at the foot of the hills that encircle the Manipur valley) seems to have quietly celebrated, over the many years since its inception, this position of silence and liminality as a source of strength, creativity and resilience. Kanhailal writes of his training process: “Believing in the autonomy of theatre, we swallowed the text and absorbed it into our body instead of speaking out the lines through lip movement, facial and finger gestures. We shattered the whole network of illusion on the stage. We were no longer burdened with the heavy light, costume and make-up. We cleaned the stage as an empty space where we began to unfold the autonomy of theatre…”[iii] However, rather than being the inward-turning process that it seems to imply, this methodical minimalism resulted in several interesting experiments by the director in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He stepped out of mainstream proscenium theatre practice to work with untrained villagers in distant areas of Manipur and market women from the famous Nupi Keithel (women’s market) of Imphal. Kanhailal was deeply influenced, according to his own admission and that of scholars like Lokendra Arambam, by the event of Badal’s Sircar’s visit to Imphal in 1973. Sircar staged his production Ebong Indrajit, and this was followed by a workshop production of Spartacus that Sircar staged with various young directors and theatre workers of Imphal. It provided the practitioners a window into a theatre aesthetics completely different from the traditional grammars of Manipuri performance practice. The young Kanhailal was so struck by Sircar’s method that he followed him to Calcutta and spent a considerable amount of time learning from him, watching him closely. He writes of the period: “Badal-da helped me very much. I give him the respect of a guru. When I worked with him I could not fully grasp his concepts. But as human beings, we learn from our experiences, don’t we? I learnt through all these experiences, the meaning came later.”[iv] Perhaps Kanhailal arrived at the meaning, several years later, while working with the seventy working-class women in the central women’s market of Imphal. In the winter of 1978, he fashioned a theatrical event called Nupi Lan (Women’s War), based partly on the history of women’s struggles and political resistance in Manipur since the late nineteenth century. The ‘market women’ of Imphal are referred to frequently in all important studies of Manipuri society, politics, history and culture. In Manipur, almost all trading activity is traditionally controlled by women and there are bazaars in Imphal that are run entirely by women. It is conventionally considered bad form for men to frequent these bazaars. Both buying and selling activities in these market spaces are conducted mostly by women. Imphal’s largest and most central market, called Khwairamban bazaar, is also operated completely by women. Women from villages all around Imphal travel to this market everyday to sell their agricultural produce. This Khwairamban market is also known as the Ima market (the market run by mothers) or the Nupi Keithel (women’s market). The history of the two ‘Women’s Wars’ or Nupi Lan in colonial times is associated almost entirely with the women’s market. These wars were waged, on both occasions, by the ‘market women’ against the policies and orders of the colonial administration, the first in 1904