A Friend's Story

Message To Go

A revival of Vijay Tendulkar’s Mitrachi Goshta in English (Gowri Ramnarayan’s translation), as A Friend’s Story (directed by Akash Khurana) was austere in its presentation but powerful in impact.  (Disclosure: I work for the NCPA that produced this play, so the following words are about the play, not the production).

Tendulkar’s play was provocative and so relevant that it could have been written yesterday, but for period details that set it in the 1950s. The playwright had taken it upon himself to puncture accepted social norms, and under special attack was middle-class sexual hypocrisy. Mitrachi Goshta was written at time when there was so much confusion about homosexuality.  The women’s movement was just about taking off, and though women were being encouraged to study, get involved in the arts and sports, ultimately they had to marry a man their families chose and put an end to their own aspirations.

 Sumitra, or Mitra (played by Sayalee Phatak) as she likes to be called, is not like other girls her age, and in a burst of self-awareness rare for one so young and a time when coming of the closet was not an option – the existence of a closet was not even known to women—she understands that she can’t be a man’s woman.  But lack of a support structure and openness about alternate sexuality results in her behavior being aggressive, obsessive (towards the girl she loves, played by Parna Pethe) and reckless. The narrator of her story is her sympathetic friend Bapu (Abhay Mahajan), who tries very hard to help her, but after a point, even he is baffled by her and unable to withstand the gale force of her passion. The loss of Nama, the hate attacks by Nama’s jilted boyfriend (Dhruv Kalra) and finally the withdrawal of Bapu’s friendship pushes Mitra into an abyss of hopelessness.

Back in 1981 when the play was first performed in Marathi (Rohini Hattangady courageously played Mitra) a girl like Sumitra would be lost in a haze of ignorance and incomprehension; today, over three decades later, she would probably not be so alone, but unless she had an unusually enlightened family, she would still be trying to get a fix on her identity, amidst all the token noises of understanding the ‘rainbow’ spectrum.  Which is why Tendulkar's play was, and remains, significant.