From the Kitchen to the Stage (BH:D184)

February 3, 2012

'Adukalayil ninnu Arangathekku' (from the kitchen to the stage) by V.T. Bhattathirippad raised a profound, powerful storm in the Kerala society when it was staged first time in 1929. The drama traveled all over the state, initially from Namboothiri home to home and then to bigger stages, uprooting in its wake a rigid, inhuman, superstitious social set up that had survived for centuries. 

The Namboothiri community suffered from several severe disorders that even today continue to plague other communities and keep resurfacing in others in various forms. Namboothiri women were mostly consigned indoors and had to wear a shroud-like all covering cloth called 'ghosha' in front of men. Only the senior-most man in any family could marry from the same community. The younger brothers would be given pocket money by this oldest brother but they couldn't have a family life. The best they could hope for was sleeping around with Nair women and women from a few select other castes. The old, ailing senior Namboothiri married multiple times, mostly for dowry money and property. Teenage girls frequently formed their brides. Widow remarriage was forbidden, so with the early death of their octogenarian husbands, these women were forced into the darkened corridors of perpetual gloom for the rest of their lives. 

With the taxation system and the rising popularity of education under the British, the social structure began to unravel as the 19th century came to a close. Nair society moved from matriarchal set up that enforced transfer of property from uncles to nephews to a patrilineal system of property transfer. This shift jolted the "arrangement" with Nair women that had benefited the younger brothers in the Namboothiri caste. These young men were also saw the impact education was having on their peers in other communities while they were stuck reciting meaningless thousand year old mantras. The time was ripe for a revolution in the setup and it was headed by one such "younger brother" (they were called afpan namboothiris): V. T. Bhattathirippad.

V.T's approach was to shake up the Namboothiri women (called Antharjanams=the ones inside the house) by holding a literary mirror on their sorry plight and prodding them with rays of hope through his short, sweet and touching stories published regularly and later compiled under the title Rajanitharangam. In 1929, along with EMS Namboothirippad (another afpan who would go on to become Kerala's first chief minister) V.T decided to up the ante. He had initially planned the work as a novel but figured that a drama would have more impact. With no prior experience, he wrote the powerful "Adukalayil ninnu Arangathekku"  (from the kitchen to the stage) in 15 days flat. The target audience is clear from the title itself. 

Not only didn't he have any prior drama experience, his literacy itself came pretty late in life. In his very touching and award winning autobiography "Kannerum Kinnavum" (Tears & Dreams) he talks about his shame when a girl of the 'thiya' caste asked him, then 17 years old, to help her read something. V.T shrinks in front of her because of his illiteracy. All he had learnt was some mantras in the oral tradition. He begs her to teach him the Malayalam alphabet and she does. It is impossible to read the autobiography without choking up at the part where he describes his out of the world ecstatic experience as he puts together the letters for the first time in his life to read 'Maanmark kuda' (Deer mark umbrella) label on an umbrella. That 'thiya' girl was his guru. A dam inside him burst. There was no stopping the flow of words from his pen from then on.  

V.T would write years later how E.M.S who was helping him backstage at the first staging of the play couldn't express his happiness in words because of his stuttering problem. But on seeing the reaction of the audience, he was jumping with joy and hugged V.T. These two "younger brothers" had dealt a death blow to an ancient, exploitative system. Namboothiri women threw away their restrictive 'ghosha' clothes after the staging. Young Namboothiri men cut off their tufts. Strong legal moves began for their right to marry. Widow remarriage was initiated into the community by V.T himself by performing the marriage of one of his aunts. While the conservative men whom the existing system had benefited fretted and frowned, women donated their bangles to the drama troupe as a show of support. 

V.T. Bhattathirippad's drama remains a glorious tribute to the magnificent power of the theater to bring about social change. 

The original performance of the play lasted 7 hours. This morning, Achan and I took turns reading the script. It took us one hour. We read with great difficulty the Namboothiri dialect of Malayalam. The staging this evening as part of the Communist Party's conference was a "re-reading" of the play by a troupe from Palakkad. The re-enactment lasted a little over an hour.

We reached the venue, the great Victoria Jubilee Town Hall, a remnant of the British period of Thiruvananthapuram nearly an hour before the scheduled time. A communist party seminar on the Lokpal bill and corruption was in full swing. The theater was packed with party comrades. Heck! I even noticed EMS's photo as the wallpaper in a mobile phone! Activist Aruna Roy had spoken early. Since we realized that getting good seats for the play would be difficult, we snuck in and had to listen to the final half hour of the seminar. 

Almost the entire seminar audience stayed back for the drama. At least another hundred came in specifically for the play, so we had more than a packed house. My youngest uncle also joined us.

If we hadn't read the play this morning, this would have been a total debacle. The soundtrack of the drama was very well designed with a good mix of Sanskrit chants, sopana music and instrumental pieces but the sound system refused to cooperate with the microphone system. The result was frequent complete drowning of the dialog. As the play was chopped up, along with the natural difficulty to follow the unfamiliar Namboothiri dialect, I am pretty sure a big chunk of the audience left confused about the tremendous impact and significance of the play.

A symbolic ritual worship of a woman in 'ghosha' opened the play. I was quite thrilled to see the use of real fire on stage after all the OSHA regulations on the American stage. India is least bothered about the amount of fire used in a fully packed auditorium. Who cares if a few hundred are blazed off in a population of one billion. We will make up that lost ground in a matter of minutes!

The playwright as a narrator was added in this enactment. The actors assembled on stage in the beginning and put on their tuft wigs and sacred threads ceremonially. Nice touch. Despite the bad sound system, few of the performers sparkled. The 'Othikkon' (teacher of the oral tradition) totally nailed his character. The octogenarian Namboothiri who readily comes to marry the teenager Thethi did a great job showing that greed only grows with age. The girl who played Thethi should land offers from TV shows. 

In the original staging in the 1930s, V.T had made the traditional procession of the tottering, frail but lusty groom enter through the audience, sending a clear message and pulling the audience into the action. It was repeated tonight with great effect. The original drama ends with the bride's brother securing a court injunction preventing her forced marriage with the old man, taking off her 'ghosha' and getting her married to their childhood friend and hero of the play, Madhavan. Tonight's enactment went a step further with an added scene showing how the caste spirit is making an ominous return to the Kerala society. An author had recently observed that people in Kerala speak these days in such a way that within the first four or five sentences, they will drop clear signals about their caste. It is a dangerous and pitiful condition. So the play ends true to the communist party spirit by calling for a burning down of the temples and the churches that continue to pollute the society with their superstitions.

While that message is being delivered on stage at the party conference, an exhibition going on the city titled "Marx was right" has incorporated Jesus Christ as a Marxist. Protest has erupted among the Christian devout. Marx was a 100% right when he wrote that history of civilization has been the history of class struggle. But what V.T showed with his life and his play is that  in such a struggle, true and lasting reformation can come only from within that society or community. All that is imposed, including reformation and order, must perish. 

Ashokan Cheruvil has written the latest edition of his weekly column that a society that refuses to let its collective experience become the catalyst for creative pursuits, suffers from the danger of institutionalizing them. As Indian cinema, media and upper middle class surge through a blind imitation of the creative products of the West, India's own problems of abject poverty, mafia, prostitution and corruption across the board rapidly becomes institutionalized. Art that is supposed to draw its mirroring strength from the society lies shattered today in the pursuit of profit.
Modern India needs a thousand V.Ts!