Piyush Mishra juggles acting, direction, singing and writing with equal aplomb. He returns to theatre after 16 years with Gagan Damama Bajyo, the first play that he wrote to discover that much has changed, says Saimi Sattar
The torrent of words flows thick and fast. It is as if the words are having a tough time catching up with the thoughts that come crowded in bundles. Just like the numerous descriptions that actor, lyricist, music director, singer, screenplay writer and now theatre director Piyush Mishra juggles with, his expressions too are multifarious.
Mishra, who returns to the stage after a hiatus of 16 years, is directing Gagan Damama Bajyo on the revolutionary Bhagat Singh which was staged for the first time in 1994. One wonders if a revisit means that the play has undergone some change. Says he, “The situation has not changed. The storyline of the play ends in 1994 when the last of Bhagat Singh’s comrade, Shiv Verma died and we make an announcement to the effect at the beginning of the play.”
Mishra, who is a cult figure, thanks to his poetry which has stuck a chord among the millenials, is in thrall of the martyr. “A historical figure, which should have been placed on the same footing as Mahatma Gandhi and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, has been relegated to two pages in the class VIII NCERT books where only three things are mentioned about him. That he threw a bomb in the assembly, killed Sanders and escaped. When I started writing this play, I realised that I did not even know his surname. I asked Hindustan and I was not the only one.”
As he read more to develop his play, Mishra got pulled into the vortex and realised that he was dealing with a giant of a figure. “History books had not done justice to him as Bhagat Singh had fought against the ideology of the ruling dispensation that came to power after Independence. But they couldn’t completely finish him or his legacy as he was such a big symbol. Where have you seen a ‘23.5 year old’ boy, who wrote so much before dying? If you look at the revolutionaries of the world, whether it is Giuseppe Mazzini, Che Guevera, Raza Khan, Lafayette, Fidel Castro or Mahatma Gandhi, none of them was martyred so young,” he asserts passionately, floundering sometimes as he finds himself at a loss for words so overcome he seems to be with emotions. He adds after a slight pause, “He was a genius, an intellectual and extremely good-looking person. He wrote about love, politics and bomb. One of his popular essays was, Why I am an atheist. When he was imprisoned and sentenced to death around 1930-31, his popularity was at par, if not more, than Mahatma Gandhi as letters poured in from all over the world to save him.”
Mishra says that while there were a number of people who were ready to give up their lives for the sake of the country, what made Bhagat Singh stand was that he believed these deaths would be in vain. “‘Don’t die till your death or every drop of your blood brings a revolution,’ is what he believed in. And he proved it by his actions. He threw the bomb in the Assembly when media from India and abroad were present but did it at a place where no one would get hurt. Then he started an entire movement from jail, which created a revolution in the country,” says Mishra.
While many know that Bhagat Singh refused to get married, thanks to the cult film Rang De Basanti, which had the line Aazadi meri dulhan hai, not many are aware that he was not against love per se. “He said that in a servile country there was no place for something as pure as love,” points out Mishra.
But not just his thoughts on love, it is the ones on Independence that Mishra finds himself in complete coherence with. “Bhagat Singh said that if get Independence in the wrong manner, the Whites will be replaced by the Browns and nothing will change. And that is what happened. He felt that a revolution cannot be brought about by bombs and blasts but by thoughts and change,” says Mishra.
The persona of Bhagat Singh has come alive several times in films like Shaheed (1965), Rang De Basanti (2006), 23rd March 1931: Shaheed (2002) and The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002). The script of the last one was taken from Gagan Damama Bajyo. Mishra feels that films can never match live interaction that theatre can create. “The resonance that happens when you have a live audience is hard to achieve in cinema. Very few films can create it,” he says. The play has been presented by Question & Associates.
When he wrote the play 25 years ago, it was published and sold out within seven days. Mishra says, “I was not expecting that it would be so popular. I really feel that it was Sardar Bhagat Singh in heaven who made it possible. I don't know how I wrote it within two months. Even though there were very a few shows at that time but now, it is staged all over the world on both his birth and death anniversaries.”
However, it is not just as a playwright that Mishra has made his mark, he has also established himself as an actor par excellence. He first burst onto the consciousness of the audience in the film Gulaal, where he played Prithvi Bana, the conscience of the characters. “The film started in 2002 but was released in 2009 and none of us were paid for it. I had just shifted to Mumbai. I was passionate, very troubled and practically going helter skelter. And the character was a little mad and a Communist. The temperament of Gulaal was such that people like that just blended in. At that time Anurag (Kashyap) and I had a great rapport and he told me to do everything from the lyrics to the music,” he recalls. Mishra was in thrall of theatre and greatly influenced by it so he felt he could do just anything. The result was that he wrote eight songs in seven days, some of them improvised from theatre like Jab Sheher Humara Sota Hai and Yaara Maula. “The film flopped on screen but is a great hit on the internet and one of the most watched ones especially in college campuses,” he says.
However, his collaboration with Anurag ended with Gangs of Wasseypur as Mishra does not have the stomach for the overtly sexual and violent films that the director is prone to making nowadays. “Sex and violence without any reason is something that I have an objection to. I am of a certain age and once you cross 50 you become more spiritual and toned down,” he says.
That is also the problem that he has with web series. “The way the scenes are shot is often unaesthetic. I think a censor board, therefore, is very important,” says the actor, who played the defence lawyer in Pink, who prefers Rajkumar Hirani’s clean films which can be watched with the entire family and are also a huge hit. He gave the example of a web series called Salt City on Mumbai where he plays the family patriarch which does not have explicit content.
However, while he has now dabbled in different media and their related art forms, as a child and later as a young man, he was very confused at one time. “I had done theatre, sculpture, painting, singing, playing the sitar and poetry — all of this before class XII,” he recalls. But there was one thing that he was very sure of — that he felt stifled in his hometown, Gwalior, and would do anything that it took to leave it. It was on account of this irritation and the desire to get away from everything familiar rather than the desire to be an actor that he applied at National School of Drama. He cleared it in the first attempt. Of his alma mater he has only fond things to say: “It played a huge role in my career. NSD is my home and the Mecca of theatre acting even in the worst of times. If you are willing to learn, you will turn out to be exceptional and even if you aren’t you will imbibe a lot.”
It was in the first semester of his second year that he met German director, Fritz Bennewitz, who Mishra considers to be his guru. Bennewitz cast him in the title role in Hamlet. “That was the beginning of a grand obsession called acting. Till then, I was not sure if that was what I wanted to pursue. That madness has continued,” says Mishra. He realises in hindsight that he was an amateur who just followed the lead of the director. It was only when he joined the theatre group, Act One in 1990, that he developed his own method and style.
Although he might not have had the clarity about his chosen profession, but there was never denying the fact that he had a mind of his own from a young age. Mishra was called Priyakant Sharma and had been adopted by his father’s sister and he hated his name. “Who is called Priyakant? People teased me as Priya, Priya. I asked my friends to call me PK but then it took on the connotation of a drunk. I had to change my surname to Mishra to become a part of my bua’s family. So alongside the surname, I changed my name too by an affidavit,” says Mishra of the time when he was in class X.
Another thing rooted in the past was his affinity towards poetry. In class VIII he wrote his first poem Zinda ho haan tum koi shak nahin (Yes you are alive; of this there is no doubt). And it is this temperament that has continued in his present day work too. He elaborates, “My poetry is reactionary and that is because my thinking has always been radical. I always felt that neither my parents, relatives, nor my friends understood me. It made me angry and reactionary. When people ask, ‘how can you write this way?’ I say that, ‘this is the only way that I can write’.”
A large part of his popularity can also be attributed to the poetry and the lyrics that he writes. The songs that stemmed out of this poetry are performed by a group called Ballimaran. “At gatherings, people always wanted me to sing. Nishant Agarwal, who is a friend, told me that we should form a band which would sing songs from theatre and not films. We started with a guitar and a tabla and now other instruments have been added to it.”
Given the fact that he juggles a lot of different things — acting, music, lyrics and script writing — one is naturally curious how all of them interact with and influence each other. For Mishra, acting is the centre around which everything else revolves. “I would not be able to do anything without acting as everything comes out of it. Writing comes from it. I have to enact and then only I can see how each character will speak,” he says.
“I was earning money by doing cinema which gave me stability and helped me bring up my family. But after a while, I felt I have become repetitive. My wife pushed me to do this as did Rahul Gandhi, my manager and the creator of Tamboo production house,” he adds.
Returning to the theatre felt like a return to the roots. “I can’t say this is my first love and cinema, second, as without earning my livelihood in the latter, I wouldn’t have been able to do this play. Both are my girlfriends,” he says with a laugh.
A return after a long hiatus also means that he can see the changes in the performing art. “The platform is the same but the entry of corporates has changed it. Earlier it was not possible to support a family on the earnings from theatre. If you do a good play, you will earn money even if it might not be as much as cinema. You can create a product that you like where there are no creative compromises. So it is a good place to be in,” he says.
Given the change in content, he feels it is a good time to be a part of that industry as well. “Roles are being developed for a lot of character actors like Pankaj Tripathi and Nawazuddin who have come to the forefront not due to their looks but their acting prowess. Pankaj is one of the busiest actors these days. It is a golden phase which was never there in Indian cinema and add to it the plethora of opportunities in the web series.”
Looking forward, Mishra has also written Shamshera for Yashraj, which stars Ranbir Kapoor and Sanjay Dutt. He will be seen in the web series Law and Order and two Indo Canadian films Palki and Jail 50. A book of his writings is soon set to hit the market. Clearly, it is in juggling different things that Mishra has found his oeuvre.
(The show will be staged on September 15 at NSD.)
