10 August,2011 07:16 AM IST | | Aditi Sharma
After 20 years, the Sultan Padamsee Award for Playwrighting was reinstituted to recognise Indian talent in writing English plays. Here's a look at the three big winners who were chosen after a tedious 10-month-long process
On August 7, Mumbai's English theatre community came together to celebrate six new plays and remember Sultan Padamsee, founder of the city's oldest English theatre ensembleu00a0-- Theatre Group (TG). Alyque Padamsee's elder brother Bobby, as most people knew Sultan, joined hands with names like Derryck Jefferies, Jean Bhownagary, Adi Marzban to give Mumbai (then Bombay) productions like Othello and Salome. Tragically, only five years after TG was formed Bobby passed away in 1946. The Sultan Padamsee Award for Playwriting was instituted in his memory. The award has been revived after 20 years with a focus on finding and encouraging playwrighting talent in the country. We chat with the winners of the prestigious award.
Sultan Bobby Padamsee
Ram Ganesh Kamatham (Winner of the first prize for his play Ultimate Kurukshetra)
If you are a regular theatregoer from Mumbai or Bengaluru, you must certainly have seen, or at least heard of, Ram's work over the past decade. To say that Ram is a prolific playwright would be an understatement considering he does not recall the total number of plays he has written over the years. "My blog has a list of all my works," he suggests, in a bid to help. At last count, Ram has worked on 30 complete and work-in-progress plays since 2001. He was, until recently, the executive editor of PT Notes, Prithvi Theatre's newsletter. At the moment, he is preparing to pursue a Masters in Media Anthropology in UK.
His latest play, Ultimate Kurukshetra, which has won him the Sultan Padamsee Award, is an ant's-eye view of the epic battle. Why ant's eye view? "I tried to take a sweeping view and that took me seven years," he laughs. "Rather than the eagle eye view, I decided to look at the battle from the ant's eye. You get a sense of the epic in the play, even though it's smaller in scale but it doesn't the encompass gigantic piece of action.
Minor forgettables in The Mahabharata are earth-shattering moments in Ultimate Kurukshetra," says Ram. The play is in pre-production stage as of now and will be staged soon.
Chanakya Vyas (Winner of the first runner up prize for Tales of Kutty)
Bengaluru-based theatre practitioner Chanakya Vyas is the youngest recipient of the award. He started off as an actor in a play called Lucknow '76 in 2008 and has worked in several plays since then. Currently, he is working on an arts education programme run by the Indian Ensemble Theatre. The young playwright has been working with kids from an underprivileged background, helping them shape their personality through theatre.
Hailing from a technical background (he graduated as an Electronics & Telecommunications engineer in 2008), Chanakya was struck by how a majority of families from Tamil Nadu and Bangalore prefer that their child take up science as a profession. "There's a big inclination in families here to push their children into medical or engineering profession," he says. His play Tales of Kutty is a take off from this situation. "The play looks at what would happen to a young boy whose family has high hopes from him and yet he fails in his board exams.
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The story is about the boy's survival," shares the first-time playwright. Mashaal, a theatre group formed by past students of BITS, Pilani, will soon stage Tales of Kutty.
Sabina Mehta Jaitly (Winner of second runner up prize for Nasreen)
With nearly 40 years of experience in theatre, Sabina is a well-known face in the Delhi circuit and beyond. However, over the years, Sabina has focussed largely on acting and has over sixty plays in Hindi, Urdu and English in her kitty. She has also directed three plays and written two playsu00a0-- Voh Din... Voh Log... based on Ismat Chugtai's stories and Mirza Bagh based loosely on Brian Friel's Aristocrat. Sabina was the director of Delhi-based theatre group Yatrik for five years, before she founded her own group called Dramebaaz.
Through her play Nasreen, Sabina looks at the post-Babri Masjid, post-Pokhran India in 1998, when Uttar Pradesh was afire with communal tensions. "Unlike much of the Indian writing in English today, which deals with the problems of Indian ufffdmigr ufffds in the West, this is the story of a Muslim woman who has spent a good part of her childhood in the West, and finds it difficult to adjust in provincial India," says Sabina. Things come to a boil when Nasreen is forced to attack and wound the molesters of her friend, a Catholic nun, in the church.
Moreover, her young daughter's Hindu boyfriend, a journalist, is murdered by extremist groups while investigating the case.
