The Akshara Ramayana that went onto Broadway is right here in Delhi this week. Jalabala Vaidya has more to say
Ten burning heads falling to the ground, shot to extinction with a single arrow. lord Rama’s. Once more the coming of Rama — the Ramayana — is upon us. And with Rama, Sita. Beautiful, learned, found in a furrow of ploughed earth, is she a victimIJ Or, as the Akshara Ramayana, written and directed by Gopal Sharman says, is it she who, hand in hand, leads Rama and herself to divinityIJ So that, in the final words of the play, Rama responds to her words: “Then grant me my universe in my love for you, my freedom absolute, salvation absolute in my love for you. let me cease to be in my love for you. My being merge with you.” And Rama: “So that we be both cause and effect, both beginning and the end, both form and formlessness, locality, totality and suffer no duality.”
Year after year the Ramayana leads me, inexorably, to a re-evaluation of existence — my own life, the life of our Akshara Theatre with its young, aspiring, brilliant boys and girls teetering on the brink of a harsh, buffeting life-ocean. The ocean of this huge diverse country with its myriad conflicting currents once harmonised into one by Rama’s idealism. The existence of the world, the physical earth, the universe — a Big Bang from out of nothingIJ An existential nothing or a perpetual sanatan dharma, the continuous emerging of manifest existence out of the unmanifestIJ And thus, emerging into the manifest, willy nilly following the unbreakable laws of cause and effect, karmaIJ And the innumerable actions of the energy that is manifest existence, creating such a complex web, so nixing understanding that we can only name it maya.
This philosophical quest can go on forever, yet in the play, Sharman’s Ramayana, or the Akshara Ramayana as he prefers to call it, the quest is encapsuled in human life that unfolds before our eyes. Not the black and white of good and evil as shown in the bellowing Ramleelas that are played enthusiastically on every street corner and big maidan, but the layered motivations, the loves and lusts and politics of real people traversing their lives with forgotten actions from the past tripping them in the present, obsessions which are a complex of ego and libido, as in Ravana, or ego and his reading of dharma as in Rama.
Then the three women in the play — Sita, Kaikeyi and Mandodari — how do they come outIJ How does their human nature handle the social constraints of the time, not so much voiced as assumedIJ
Above all, lilting through the text, the lovely language, especially evident in Hanuman’s speeches, the only metaphysical character present. All else are purely human, making human mistakes, painted with human conceits, Rama and Sita too, and of course, the others.
So, year after year the Ramayana rolls round, particularly for me, with its memories from my own life — the extravagance of a Broadway opening, flowers all day, baskets of gifts, the celebrities walking into the audience: Arthur Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Time magazine editors, whispered to me in my dressing room.
Today, in our own dear Akshara theatre, hand crafted by Gopal with so much love, watching the audience enter, creatures of this period of time which is heavy with the impending 2014 national election, playing out its fierce fight to the finish, no holds barred, just like it happened in Ayodhya so many thousand years ago.
How strange that this thousands of years old story, enacted by real people once upon a time, and then recreated by different poets in different periods of history, each with their own compulsions, of politics or of a quest for divinity, colouring not just us, the actors but also our time too.
Time is the curtain, are opening words of the play and it seems that time is ultimately circular while being so incredibly linear to us. Its invisible barrier a prison and a glass wall that shows us a way to freedom, as Hanuman tells us, by listening to the story of Rama, the man and woman, the two human beings, who became free of the curtain of time without ceasing to be human.
The performances will run from October 15-17, 7 pm at the Akshara Theatre. Tickets will be available at the Akshara Theatre-01123361075 and on bookmyshow.com