An open letter to the cast of ‘Khel,’ on their art of casting aside

I am uploading here a guest comment as a blog-post as it concerns a person - Prof. Shyama Prasad Ganguly - who is my close friend and co-author and also because it relates to questions of integrity in artistic production.  - Indranil

Dear lead pair: you made my eyes leak. A prominent English daily on March 3, 2014, carried a photo of that riveting Bengali play Khaila, scripted by the outstanding playwright Sisir Kumar Das, directed by the brilliant director Shamu  Ganguly. The photo, taken at one of the several stagings of Khaila in New Delhi years ago (produced by Bikalpa), repackages it here as ‘a scene from Khel,’ where ‘Khel’ is ‘A Play in Hindi….By Averee Chaurey and team, New Delhi.’ The problem with this is two-fold.

a) That it is untrue. (The image is a scene from the Bengali Khaila, and not the Hindi Khel, since Khel was yet to be staged at the time of this article).

b) That it is unethical. (To omit altogether the name and the role of the Director of the original play, of which this is but a translation).

That this team manages to expound on their abundant influences and inspirations that culminate in Khel, without a mention of the Director who's labor and artistry shaped the very characters that the Hindi version would be re-delivering – is jaw-dropping. It is jaw-dropping for reasons and concerns of ethics, honesty and integrity that will be self-evident to most artists. It is tear-inducing, however, for reasons that cannot even be described.

For days and weeks and months, and months together, the Director of the original Khaila reflected on the script in order to sculpt the characters of the elderly couple that are now playing Khel (game, if you like). The profoundly stirring script by Sisir Kumar Das met the immense work and thought invested by Shamu Ganguly in mounting the play that moved audiences. You will know best the painstaking emotional and physical mentoring that was involved in shaping the characters that you play in the Hindi Khel. Better than anyone else, you will know that this was accomplished over years, and over the course of some sixteen productions across India. Is it all a blur? Like looking through those hyperbolic, cloudy glasses that your character was made to wear in Khaila (an exemplary directorial touch in and of itself, where the old, lonely, desperate, neglected, mother deceives herself into believing that the glasses would correct her failing sight and pathetic life, knowing the whole time that it corrected nothing)? What is it that leads you to make such a colossal omission in presenting and announcing Khel?

Let us, for a moment, gloss over the most obvious purpose with which such omissions are usually made. Let’s pick another, more generous one; one that doesn’t entirely fracture my conviction in people and the human relationships that they are out to build through art. Could it be, perhaps, an over-identification with the theme of the play itself - the deplorable reality of parents, mentors, best cut off and forgotten? There couldn’t be a better way of doing poetic justice to the very plot of the play.

As I read about all the publicity of Khel – ‘a play by Averee Chaurey’ (a truth that only the imagination may grasp) - I cannot help but wonder what a visionary Sisir Kumar Das was, to nail down so precisely through his script this ever-shrinking space for human sentiments such as dignity, grace and gratefulness. Off-stage, you show it best.

Ritika