Educationist, screenplay writer, playwright, art critic and theatre director rolled into one, Dr Ramesh Prasad Panigrahi is a living legend in the world of Odia drama with 83 plays besides a number of books in English on art and culture of Odisha in his ensemble. Dr Panigrahi, a Professor of English literature by profession and a playwright by passion, takes his audience on a rollercoaster ride to an exotic arena where he listens to a new music of consciousness. According to the words of award-winning playwright and former director of Doordarshan Mihir Meher, ”His peers and predecessors like Manoranjan Das, Bijay Mishra, Kartik Rath, Ratnakar Chaini, Rati Mishra offer no intellectual parallel to Dr Panigrahi in mass appeal as well as in aesthetic experimentation. In an interview to The Pioneer, Dr Panigrahi talked to Sugyan Choudhury about himself, his passion and the low-brow style of mass production in art that has recently contaminated all mediums, pandering to a bad taste.
How are your dramas a class apart from your contemporaries and predecessorsIJ
A year ahead of Girish Karnard wrote Haya Badan, I had already set a new trend of modelling the plotlines on myths in my Mahanatak. It was in 1970 when the theatre scenario across the country looked bleak scaring away the audiences with bland absurdities and oddities. Some around here immediately followed me in fashioning their plays. The Bengali, Assamese and Hindi editions of this play have equally held fascinations for the theatre-goers in other States. This play that brought me Odisha Sahitya Akademi Award in 1974, is nearing the night of its silver jubilee (his lips curled in delight). The English version of this play entitled The Emperor with His Pot is going to be produced by the Odia Society of America soon. I also first employed folk art in theatre by integrating Daskathia into Mahanatak. I began adorning my dramas with myth and folk culture in a bid to bring the perception of drama to that of hanging from a giddy-high cliff. Connecting tradition with modernity, fantasy with reality and imagination with here and there congeals the core of drama in a work of art.
You have brought about revolution in almost all aspects of cultural life of this State by writing and directing plays, inspiring new playwrights, preparing a blueprint to revive awareness about the art forms on the verge of extinction. How would you assess the volume of your work and creationIJ
I have so far scribbled 84 plays, some of them translated into English by me, since my first creation Muktimandap in 1963 besides several lyrics for radio, screenplays for films, scripts for TV series stories, novels, articles for journals and books in English on art and culture of Odisha like Orissan, Six Contemporary Painters from Orissa, Continuity in the Flux:Orissa 1988, The Splintered Self:Character and Vision in Sam Shepard’s Plays, Perspective on Odissi Theatre, Signboard on the Marquee, Face, Surface Interface: Ontology of Odia Culture, Colonial Odia literature to mention a few. In these years, I have undertaken to write a fresh category of flash plays encapsulated in timeslots lasting for seven or so minutes. I brand them as anti-plays, atom plays, epic plays. These plays revolutionise the theatre performing space. They do away with traditional proscenium stage by preferring street corners and sands of seashores as venues for performance. Biswambhar Senapati and Darpan Upakhyan and Nishabda Shobhajatra fall under this genre. Nishabda Shobhajatra is a silent play; it has no dialogue. They are designed to strike a new chord in entertaining the viewers.
Can we aspire to excel on the national arenaIJ
Our language is very rich. Besides, theatre has a language of its own. If it is rightly exploited then it can lead us to incredible glory. My plays are highly acclaimed by non-Odia audiences also. I negotiate time with timelessness to create a new identity in the pan-Indian theatrical map.
How do you figure out the future of drama and theatre while audience crave for TV serialsIJ
Theatre has its own charm. Physical presence is ten times more impacting than TV soaps and other commercial trashes. They serve Kitsch and Pastiche denoting low-brow style of mass-produced art and things catering to bad taste. The epoch is running through post-modern phase of cultural upheaval in which art lapses into artifact, something that can be marketed commercially. Creative writers caught in the process of mass cultural production become bankrupt in their creative space.
Why do not you ever feature in the list of awardees of the Kendra Sahitya Akademi while people well below your status in ripeness and fecundity surprisingly bag the trophiesIJ
Award-giving institutions are usually peopled with those who are seen to have an ulterior agenda quite different from the ideology they are believed to cheer and cherish. They are operating in tryst with culture mafias fostering bias towards regionalism, casteism and parochialism. I neither negotiate for a political space that helps grab the awards, nor do I have time to lobby for one. They no more hold allure for me. They are being fixed well before the screening committee formally undertakes the beggar exercise of deliberating upon it. On the other hand, my cramped schedule of creative work keeps me too obsessed ever to wish for awards. Perhaps I am a purist…a stranger amidst conformists. I bear my cross cheerfully well when I share my thoughts with the all-time great dramatist of the world, George Bernard Shaw, who had once remarked while refusing Nobel Prize, “I like a state of continual becoming, with always a goal in front but not behind.”
You are popularly held as saviour of Jatra in Odisha reviving and refurbishing it from its moribund state. Why are you not seen producing any these daysIJ
Growing years and falling health prevent me doing so. I introduced some new features in the Jatra tradition then. The fixture of third middle stage was my innovation. I wrote, directed and scored background music simultaneously for it. I also embellished it with such dialogues that are juxtaposed with silence and experimented with interplay of visuals and sounds which generated unique audience response. My Jatra plays not only revived it but also hit headlines in newspapers. Some even used to run for ten nights at one go. They were blockbusters enticing the audience every other time he visited it. Now, a trend of simulacrum has set in there. Jatra productions have turned a factory of recycling. The new playwrights in the process of mass production invariably copy Hindi films and the audiences do not get the original thrill, so there is visible tell-tale decadence.
What is your message to the future generation of playwrightsIJ
I advise future writers to read, realise and experience the ideas contained at least in twenty books before writing one. Before writing every book, they should realise that they are in a state of nothingness and that they are going to create something new after adequate literary excursions.