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Mumbai Meri Mehbooba Hain
(Mumbai through its plays)

Its a poignant line in Vishal Bharadwaj’s MAQBOOL. Mumbai meri mehbooba hain.

Its a mehbooba you love. And irrevocably hate.

The great poets (Narayan Surve, Namdeo Dhasal, Annabhau Sathe, Amar Sheikh) and their ballads have celebrated this city. Then there were the Kamgar centres in Andheri, Worli, Naigaum, Kala Chowkie, Vikhroli. In the finest tradition of theatre, they deployed thumris, dholkiwallahs, petiwallahs, lavanis, bharood, songi and now films songs and tv serial plots.

If its Mumbai, then anything and everything goes. As a road side artiste stated: that being remembered makes you live for ever. … And does living in infamy count?

That was the fate of performances staged in open-air grounds like Jambori Maidan with audiences of 1000+. The plays are publicised through word of mouth or handbills outside Lower Parel or Currey Road station. Stagings include JWALA and SAKHARAM BINDER. Sometimes there’s something new and innovative like a play about the art of bribing a BMC official for an illegal water pipe or a satire about an arrack-drinking contest. Or a play in which two groups of unemployed lumpen youth transpires in real time over a very real cock fight.

A brief celebration of a handful of Mumbai’s plays - and what we can salvage from “the dry words of dramatic playwrights, the fancy games of foolish actors and the vain calculations of box office”.

DOONGAJI HOUSE (English)
Cyrus Mistry rose from obscurity when he bagged the Sultan Padamsee playwright award for this one, and penned what could be one of the finest texts for the Indian English stage. The play transpires in Doongaji House, an ailing decrepit house. Mistry uses the house to look hard at the Parsi community in a cosmopolitan city. Here the image of gentrified bourgeois and their real-time status begin to slip apart. The play staged by the late Toni Patel combined Parsi and Mumbaiyya life. The stage setting was realistic and magical, personal and archetypical, with daughters who drifted away, upside-down city-life, ghosts from the past and Chekhovian imagery.

ADHANTAR (Marathi)
Mountains of books and articles have been written on the rise and fall of cotton mills in Mumbai. This play by Jayant Pawar was a path-breaker. Pawar deployed his inside knowledge to provide a bottom-up view of a mill worker’s family. Adhantar starts well - promising to trace Shiv Sena’s trajectory in Mumbai - and then sinks halfway through, and soon sounds similar to most Marathi melodramas. Inspite of all that, Pawar’s voice was welcomed as a new voice in the city scape. The play heralded the arrival of Sanjay Narvekar as the lumpen youth and Bharat Jadhav as a mindless young man glued to his cricket transistor. When last heard, Mahesh Manjrekar was adapting ADHANTAR into Big Bazaar.

PATRO MITRO (Gujarati)
Naushil Mehta deftly adapted A R Gurney’s LOVE LETTERS into PATRA MITRO. The play is awash with letters, friends, the Gujarati language, Gujarati literature, Gujarati culture, and above all, Vile Parle. The staging was minimal and elegant with Jawahar (Darshan Jariwalla) and Kalpana (Mallika Sarabhai) who are childhood sweethearts. Jawahar is the conscience driven son of a biscuit factory owner (in Vile Parle, quite naturally) and Kalpana belongs to a chaotic wealthy family, which has befriended the Nehrus. He is an IIT graduate who moves to Boston for further studies and subsequently sets-up a software firm. She is a Fine Arts Graduate from M S University, Baroda who travels to Europe so as to soak in the culture, and hosts one-woman shows at the Jehangir Art Gallery. Later Naushil Mehta explored Mumbai through a Ghatkopar chawl in DEVNO DEEDHAEL and then in a park in LOVING MUMBAI.

SHOBHA YATRA (Marathi)
Shafaat Khan is perhaps one of the most under-rated playwrights in India. SHOBHA YATRA was a tour de force and performed in six languages. In dumpy godown, a motley bunch of self seekers rehearse scenes from the freedom struggle featuring nationalist heroes, as part of an Independence Day parade. The pageant is sponsored by an underworld don. Shafaat says: “SHOBHA YATRA was triggered when, I visited a maidan where a huge historical pageant was being rehearsed for the Independence day procession. As I stepped into the ground Pandit Nehru came up to ask me to light his cigarette. I found Tilak, Jhansi ki Rani and Subhash Bose having a little party, glass in hand.” Khan’s bleak but bizarre look at life has transcreated into two sparkling farces: MUMBAICHE KAVLE and BHOOMITYACHYA FARCE.

BLACK WITH EQUAL (English)
As coincidence would have it Vikram Kapadia had staged Shafaat Khan’s SHOBHA YATRA in English. It didn’t do well. The residue of that experience stayed with Kapadia. A bit of Shafaat Khan, a bit of Joe Orton and a huge dollop of Parsi theatre farce, he created a building society wherein sub-nationalism clashed. Almost every member is foul-tempered and bloodthirsty. Post riots and bomb blasts, Kapadia critically lampoons the Mumbai which stakes a claim that the city belongs to everyone. He crams the complex politics of the time into a straitjacket of modern political incorrectness, flippant jokes and a climax which would make Osama Bin Laden proud.

MOOLRAJ MANSION (Gujarati)Playwright Uttam Gada’s claim to fame is MAHARATHI which starred Paresh Raval. His MOOLRAJ MANSION (once again, Paresh Raval and Darshan Jariwalla) is lesser known. Although a typical Gujarati thriller, Gada has tried to paint the story of the Mumbai’s real estate tussle on a wide canvas. His play is the story not only of agents and sharks, as well as mafia and greed, but also of the clash of civilisations: modernity versus values, mixed with the fervid myths of nationalism, against the stifling, snobbish autocracy of the nouveau rich. Poignant ironies abounded. Other plays and films did it, but it was perhaps MOOLRAJ MANSION which did it first. It was also one of the first plays to highlight the menace of the self-professed property developer who wants to create high rise building - and demolish olde worlde heritage mansions.

BHAIYYA HAT PAY PASARTI (Marathi)
After VASTRAHARAN , this play was a personal favourite of the late Machindra Kambli. When the play was staged, there was no Raj Thackeray or MNS in sight. Those early shows, jolted the audience by dismissing many of the common explanations for the radicalisation of the Marathi manoos. It is not, as Kambli used to argue, a reaction to the “invasions” of Bhaiyyas and Biharis and Bangladeshis. The play was (and is), a manifestation of deprivation and social alienation, plus a gut reaction to the north of India and “Hindiwallah”. Whatever academics may say, the play has been a roaring success among the Marathi audience who feel Mumbai’s so-called pluralism has ensured that the Marathi Manoos has been made to detach himself from fellow citizens.

KABADDI KABBADI (Marathi)
This is Jitendra Patil’s debut play in which a young woman aspires to be a kabaddi player. The core of the play is Maharashtra’s favourite sport: kabaddi and not cricket. The conflict is staged in the living room. The girl (Mukta Barve) wants to be a kabaddi champion like her ostracised uncle, but the father (Vinay Apte) wants her to settle down, happily married like the other daughters in the USA. The girl’s energy and skills are invested in kabaddi. Needless to say, after a few stock situations, like Shreyas Talpade in Iqbal, and Sharukh Khan in Chak De, kabaddi wins.

CHAWLS on stage
Mumbai’s chawls have inspired innumerable stage performances. From Sai Paranjape’s SAKHE SEJARE to ONE ROOM KITCHEN to SHAMBHUSHYACHYA CHAWLIT to BATATCYACHI CHAWL (an adaptation of P L Deshpande’s essays). Each of these plays have massive fan following. In the midst of all this is a rare gem, Bhupen Khakkar’s MOJILA MANILAL. Khakkar recreates a chawl on stage (which Atul Dodiya and he painted for the late Mahendra Joshi’s production of the play). In the play, Manilal brings bliss in the lives of two domesticated women - in the process shocking the sensibility of his Gujarati audience who didn’t take kindly to being told that free love and sex after marriage is the key to happiness. Another trail-blazer was Suresh Chikle’s GOLPEETH about the red light area.

The One Acts
Kiran Potrekar’s one-act PRASANGIK KARAR (Marathi) was a delightful journey in a BEST bus that travels through south Mumbai to central Mumbai on the day of a bandh call. Unfortunately, he transformed the play into two-act and the piece auto-destructed. Then there was Iqbal Khwaja’s SNAFU (Hindi-English) in which Raghu More from Bhandup or Borivali enters St Xaviers College and tries to become more Xavierite than a Xavierite. Another piece was Zubin Driver’s RATHOD THE COCKROACH KILLER (English) menacingly performed by Denzil Smith about a pest control agent who disrupts middle class gentility in suburban Mumbai.

There are many more plays which have doffed their hat to Mumbai, but more about that some other time.

(First appeared in HT Cafe, Hindustan Times on 29th September)

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