From putting together Punjabi theatre in the 1980s to training Bollywood actors for Deepa Mehta’s film based on her play, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury has come a long wayWhen Amol Palekar saw The Suit in Mumbai last month, he almost immediately booked a flight to Chandigarh to meet the play’s director, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury. Palekar got more that just a tête-à-tête with Chowdhury. He returned to Mumbai, armed with the idea of doing a retrospective of her works at the Pune Theatre Festival next year.But Chowdhury is in no mood to celebrate her glorious thespian past that has spanned over 30 years, led to the production of several plays and saw her winning a Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 2003. She would rather look at the retrospective as a starting point for a new idea, a fresh story. “The more you see, the bigger is the world of the self you enter,” she reasons. Theatre, Chowdhury believes, is a process. And the final product—the play on the stage—evolves with time. “As I evolve, so does my treatment of a play,” she says. For instance, Nagamandala, the play based on Kannada folk tales that she directed in 1989, was “reinvented” in 2005. It has been re-jigged again as the plot for Deepa Mehta’s film Heaven on Earth, which releases later this year. Chowdhury doesn’t change the story, only its treatment and the acting. She conducted acting workshops in Toronto for Heaven on Earth’s cast, which includes actors such as Preity Zinta and Seema Biswas.Chowdhury makes her actors speak less and emote mostly with the body. “Not wordy text, but emotions, which are universal, are the muse of my plays,” she says. Theatre has earned Chowdhury fame, not money. Yet, the love for it keeps her going. “Theatre doesn’t earn me a living, I am my own typist, manager, and administrator. But the desire to bring on stage a glimpse of what is below the surface never satiates,” she philosophises. Theatre, however, happened to Chowdhury by accident. Raised in England till she was in Class VI, Chowdhury’s family then moved to Amritsar, which she calls “provincial”. “There was a lot of religion there. I literally lived in and out of gurudwaras,” says Chowdhury, whose doctor father was a pious man. She had no inkling of theatre, until the National School of Drama founder and later Chowdhury’s teacher, Ebrahim Alkazi, brought Othello and Jasma Odan to Amritsar in 1971.As a backstage volunteer and a “residue of post-colonialism”, Chowdhury saw in theatre a new, free world, where there was an ease between sexes and space for thoughts. In 1975, she enrolled at the NSD to study acting.But there, she found acting too limited and realised that direction was her forte. Before she could do anything about it, she got married and moved to Mumbai. There, she, along with thespians Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, formed the theatre company Majma. Her husband’s job then took her to Bhopal in 1980, where she joined Bharat Bhavan and was involved with folk theatre under B.V. Karnath’s guidance. In 1984, she was back to Punjab, this time in Chandigarh though. Her friends joked that she would probably form a bhangra band there as the dance was the only art form the city was known for. Chowdhury had to start from scratch. She made things more challenging for herself by deciding to do plays in Punjabi, despite not knowing the language well enough herself. “Punjabi was considered the language of truck drivers and dhabhawallas. Nobody wanted to touch you if you were working in Punjabi. But that was also the language of Sufiana and the Guru Granth Sahib,” she says.The absence of theatre in Chandigarh worked in Chowdhury’s favour though. It helped her create her own style. Karanth had advised her that to be truly contemporary, she must know where she comes from and work with local artists. Since then, Chowdhury’s been on a relentless search for her roots. Through her plays, she has tried to revive the lost traditions of Punjab. Her first play in Chandigarh, based on Japanese director Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, used gatka, the martial arts of the Nihangs, the Sikh military order. Then, she used Dadhis or Sufi balladeers in a play on Heer Ranjha. Her plays unconsciously helped bind Hindus and Sikhs in the tumultuous year of 1984. “My works became a political statement of sorts as the bickering communities sat together and realised the many things they shared,”she recalls. Chowdhury is penning a record of her eventful journey in theatre . She’s just completed her autobiography after having spent three years on it. The title’s not final. It may be called Behind The Curtains or Becoming So Many People, she tells us. “From my memory, I started making connections. The visual vocabulary came with my experiences and in the process, I discovered so many new facets,” she says. The show never stops.
