Interview: Danish Husain

Danish Husain is an actor, poet, theatre director, and instrumental in reviving Dastangoi, the lost art of Urdu storytelling. After the unfortunate estrangement with his performing partner, Mahmood Farooqi, he expanded it into an umbrella of Qissebaazi, to include storytelling in other languages. His love for poetry found an outlet with the Poetrification project with actor Denzil Smith, and he also went on to establish his own theatre company, Hoshruba Repertory, under which he produced plays like Chinese Coffee, Guards At The Taj and Qissa Urdu Ki Aakhiri Kitaab Ka.

“I am not thinking of myself in a slot,” he says, “I end up doing everything I like doing, which includes storytelling, poetry performances, theatrical performances, films and serials. All of them involve some sort of artistic endeavour, at the core of which is something you find and bring out and make the meaning of it more accessible to the audience. You create a moment that people witness and get sucked into, and make that moment a part of their own selves. I do whatever leads me to that. I am not overly worried about how I will be slotted or remembered. Identity is what others perceive of you.”

Husain’s family comes from Ghazipur, in Eastern UP; “Primarily a family of litterateurs, writers, clerics, scholars, administrators,” he says, “There was no one in my family who was an entertainer or actor. I was not an exceptional student, I never had many choices, so whatever was offered to me, or shown to me, I would just follow it. I ended up doing a Masters in Economics, after which I was supposed to go to the University of West Virginia to do my PhD in economics. I told my dad, I can’t do this, it doesn’t interest me. He understood and said, then take up a good job. That’s when I did my MBA and joined the banking sector. Over a period of time I started losing interest—this career wasn’t meant for me.  Around that time I started wondering, how do I fill my life? How do I find something that keeps me involved and adds more dimensions to my personality.  I was not good at music or sports, but when I was in college, I used to enjoy imitating my professors, and I thought maybe I can do theatre and acting. But I wasn’t aware of anyone in theatre; not only had I never done theatre, I didn’t even follow it.”

Because of his inexperience, the National School of Drama was out, due to its precondition of an applicant’s appearance in ten productions. “I thought I would do ten productions after joining NSD!  Around that time, in 1998, Barry John had become very big, because of his students Shah Rukh (Khan) and Manoj (Bajpayee).  So I did a three-month workshop with him, and after that I asked, what next? He said go out, give auditions. I wanted to work with him, so three months later, when his company,Theatre Action Group, was doing Tendulkar’s Khamosh! Adalat Jaari Hai, I auditioned for it, and got cast as Ponkshe. That was my first acting assignment, in May 1999, so it’s been almost twenty years since I stepped on stage.”

His lack of formal training did not hold him back, however, “Whatever acting and direction I picked up, it was on the job—I just keenly observed my directors and that’s how I acquired my knowledge and that is the reason it took me thirteen years to direct a play. I was lucky that in a very short period of time, I got to work with some of the best directors in Delhi. Wherever I performed, somebody would notice me and invite me to work in their play. I acted with Rajinder Nath, Joy Michael and Sabina Mehta Jaitly, MS Sathyu, MK Raina, and finally Habib Tanvir and learnt immensely from them, their earthy wisdom and acute observation. These people were not just about theatre, they were well-versed in a lot of things—literature, poetry, history, geo-politics, sociology and anthropology So just by hanging out with these people, there was so much to learn. 

“In Delhi, plays did not run for too many shows, it’s only when I got into Dastangoi, and we kept on doing it year after year running into thousands of shows, I realized that this is the way it works, a production just continues, Then I decided to shift to Mumbai, and I thought my strategy would be that while I produced and directed my own plays for my own personal growth and learning, every year, I would go to directors that I really wanted to work with and learn from, and I would act in their productions. I think it has been really beneficial for me, I observed different styles of direction, what skills they bring in, what is lacking in me that I can pick from them. I have been able to act with Naseeruddin Shah, Sunil Shanbag, Imran Raheed, Purva Naresh Saurabh Shukla, and it has been a great learning experience.”

Husain started his directing stint with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, “When I felt I had confidence enough and understood the medium. When you are uninitiated, when you have not gone to an institution, it’s like landing up at a big wedding and not knowing who’s who or what’s what. So you just sit there and observe and try to figure out the hierarchy and the politics... nobody is giving you a guided tour. So that’s what I was doing for thirteen years, trying to understand what theatre is. When I got in, I understood, it’s not as simple as lighting up the space or creating some background score or blocking; beyond the aesthetic sense, there was a deeper meaning to it. Just getting a few actors together is not going to help you. Only when I was sure that I could tell my stories through this medium, did I decide to direct.”

He admits that his extensive work with Dastangoi, strengthened his relationship with the text. “How to imbibe the text so that you completely personify or embody it, so that the viewer cannot see any distinction between the text and the actor. The moment the audience realizes that your text is different from your body, the spell breaks. When I decided to produce and direct, I veered towards text-based performances, because that was my strength. I would like to learn more about physical theatre and include it in my productions. But, most of the answers we are seeking are within the text. Most actors remain on the surface with the text, they memorize it and speak it, but it’s not really that. You need to dive down and go below the surface.”

Back in 2001, when he was still a banker, Husain participated in a reality TV show that was hosted by Vrajesh Hirjee. “I had no clue then, that it would become a lifelong friendship and that one day I would actually leave my job and become a part of the industry that he belongs to. When I resigned he was one of the first people I told. He was surprised but welcomed the decision. Then life moved on. And at some stage I decided to open a theatre company, and he said I want to do a play with you. I wanted to do Chinese Coffee, I had a date and a venue, and a few weeks later, we were on stage. The play (about a writer and his neurotic friend) was well-received. When I moved to Mumbai, we decided to carry on with our collaboration and that’s how Guards At The Taj happened. And it turned out to be a successful too.”

Collaboration is a word Husain uses a lot, because so much of his work is collaborative. “In Mumbai, I found a mushrooming of open mics, and it was about a lot of people reading their own work, which was not so great. So I felt, there is also a place to read classic poetry, and there is an audience for it. Poetry was part of the spoken culture of our country, in the form ofmushairas and kavi sammelans. But these now belong to a different age, and the way our urban centres have grown, they are not really the places people go to. Now it’s more about open mics and slam poetry. So I thought of performing Indian English poetry. When I spoke to Denzil, he loved the idea, then we included a musician and that’s how the ensemble developed.

“Vidya Shah (singer) asked me to collaborate on a production about Begum Akhtar, that involved storytelling and live music. I found this format very conducive to telling stories about great musicians.  It has been a very rewarding experience.” 

(This piece first appeared in The Hindu Friday Review on April 19, 2019)

Akhtari: Dastan Bai Se Begum Tak

That Magic Voice

When Danish Husain introduces his stage production of Akhtari: Dastan Bai Se Begum Tak, he says the storytelling and music format was chosen as a tribute to Begum Akhtar, because the one whose life is a dastaan (saga/story/legend) should not be turned into drama.

So, Husain in his inimitable qissebaaz style, tells of the rise of Akhtaribai Faizabadi and her transformation to the celebrated singer, Begum Akhtar, with some amusing anecdotes added by musician Badlu Khan, who accompanied singer Vidya Shah on the harmonium. Shah, a pupil of Begum Akhtar’s disciple Shanti Hiranand, sang some memorable numbers, and had the theatre humming along.

Her early life duplicated that of many female singers of that era, who were admired and idolized but still remained lower down on the social ladder and referred to as baijis. Her mother, Mushtaribai, formidable as single mothers of the time, had the young girl trained with the best ustaads, and by the time Akhtari was in her teens, her fame as a singer of ghazals, thumris, dadras and classical music spread. She gave her first public performance at fifteen, and was among the early singers to cut gramophone records. It was believed by singers then, then recording their voices would ruin them, and the story goes that young Akhtari came of the studio in tears, believing she would never be able to sing again.

Not only did she have a magnificent career as a singer and composer, she also had a brief stint in the movies, including Mehboob Khan’s classic Roti.

In 1945, she married Lucknow-based barrister, Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi, and, because she could no longer sing in public, she fell ill. The cure was, of course, a return to music and she made a comeback on All India Radio, going on to become a regular performer on radio.

Husain came up with several wonderful anecdotes; one involved a besotted rich suitor, who gifted her a silver chair. But he annoyed her no end with his insistent attentions and when a friend asked her why she didn’t get rid of him, Begum Akhtar is said to have replied, “I will as soon as I get from him a table to match.”

Then, there’s the story about poet Shakeel Badayuni, who ran after her at the station, when she was about to embark on a journey to Lucknow, to give her his latest ghazal—Begum Akhtar singing a poet’s work gave his name some of the glitter too. She glanced at it, then asked her travelling companion to take out her harmonium, and by the time she reached Lucknow, she had a new song, that she went right away and recorded on Lucknow AIR; it became one of her most iconic ghazals—Aye mohabbat tere anjaam pe rona aaya.

Those who have written about Begum Akhtar say that she took music out of the mehfils and kothas and made the baiji respectable. Her story and her music make for an engaging evening at the theatre; in this age of biopics, someone should make a movie on her too. Apart from the gripping plot, what a soundtrack it would have!

Interview: Jaimini Pathak

It has been twenty years since Jaimini Pathak established his own theatre group—Working Title—and produced about 18 plays, directed and acted several of them, wrote one, along with acting in the plays of some of the best directors in the city. The years have been enviably kind to him, which sometimes causes a peculiar problem for film or web casting directors—he looks too boyish to be cast as a middle-aged man, but is not young enough to play a youngster.  “It’s genetic,” he says, “my parents also look much younger than their age, so it’s thanks to them.” 

After spending his childhood all over the South and then Ajmer, because his father, who worked with the railways, had a transferable job, Jaimini fought the usual middle-class expectations to study science and become an engineer or doctor, landed in Mumbai’s St Xavier’s college to “suffer eco-stats double major” and stayed in the hostel. “The college had a fantastic library with so many plays. I don’t think I have read as much in my life as I did in college.”

When he was in the second year, some friends planned to do a workshop with Mumbai’s theatre maverick Satyadev Dubey. “I didn’t know who he was, I didn’t know anything. Ultimately, I was the only one who enrolled for the 40-day workshop.  He was working on one of Shaw’s prefaces, Extermination, after which we did a production and performed a few shows. After this workshop, I decided theatre is what I want to do. Then Dubeyji said, there’s this guy, Sunil (Shanbag), who is doing a play, go work with him.  So for a long time I ended up shuttling between Dubeyji and Sunil’s plays. Naseeruddin Shah saw me some of them and cast me in one of his plays. I was thrilled, aisa bhi hota hai, that someone like him calls and without an audition or anything, says, here is your role! These days, there are auditions, back then people watched an actor on stage and decided if he was good.”

Turning up for rehearsals and memorising whole plays was his “survival strategy.”  Dubey used to have an associate director, whose job was basically to remind him on his lines; in the process, Jaimini used to learn the script from beginning to end and if any actor dropped out, or was thrown out by Dubey --“as was his practice”--he could easily step into the part.

 “Dubeyji gave you a lot, but he also extracted a lot out of you—he was a terror.  Even now, my default mode for a rehearsal, or show, or shoot is anxiety. Over the years, I have realized this and learnt to control it, but, a puppy who has been beaten up, never outgrows the trauma, and always has a knee-jerk reaction to a kitten or whatever. He was like a colossus, who took everybody along with him. It was a different era—there was no TV, there was no such thing as a fulltime actor, so we turned up for rehearsals whenever we were called.”

Jaimini solved the near impossible situation of finding affordable accommodation in Mumbai by extending his courses at the university and staying in the hostel. Then he was cast as the lead in a TV serial, Farz, and that was the end of money trouble. “When I look back,” he says, “life has been something of a miracle. The right thing happening at the right time, with the right people. There was a time in the mid-Nineties, when Makrand Deshpande wanted me to do a play with him, and said I was already doing five plays, how could I fit in rehearsal time for a sixth?”

Eventually, he turned to direction, because, “I had already worked with all the directors on my bucket list. Besides, if you work with the same bunch of directors, they can’t cast you in every play, so then do you sit around idle?  The best thing about working with people like Dubey and Sunil was that by default you do everything—sets, lights, sound operation, buying costumes and props. I think I was always interested in directing—I used to give suggestions which were always accepted.

“Then Ramu Ramanathan gave me Curfew, which he said nobody else wanted to do.  Sanjna (Kapoor) gave me a slot at the Prithvi Theatre Festival in 1999. The group, Working Title was born. I don’t like the name, but it stuck.”

The Ramu-Jaimini collaboration lasted for years; he directed many the playwrights works including Combat,  3, Sakina Manzil, Postcards From Bardoli,  and two of his longest running plays Mahadevbhai (1892-1942) and The Boy Who Stopped Smiling,which are still on. “The working relationship with Ramu is very symbiotic,” he says, “There was a time when he would write almost for me. Combat was way ahead of its time, he predicted what it happening in the country today. Mahadevbhai (based on the dairies and letters of Mahatma Gandhi’s secretary) was written because of what happened in Gujarat (the Godhra incident and the riots).”

He prefers doing plays that have something to say, beyond the craft, and is always on the lookout for such work. “I have been reasonably prolific, most of my plays have done at least 40-50 shows, except a couple of star-crossed ones like The Seagull. The huge problem with doing a Chekhov play is that if an actor drops out, he cannot be replaced. I could spend all my time re-rehearsing, but it will never match up to the original vision. That’s why I leave the classics alone, and do new and original plays which have something to express and would stimulate the audience.  I like doing plays that stay with you for a long time, ideally for a lifetime.  It is possible—I have people who watched The Boy Who Stopped Smiling or Once Upon A Tiger as kids and still remember them. They come up to me and tell me they follow me on Facebook. That’s why when I don’t find something for a long time, it becomes a problem. For a long time, it was convenient, Ramu would write plays and entrust them to me. If I am to do classics, I would like to make them my own, the way Rajat Kapoor has done Shakespeare by capturing the essence, and never mind the purists!  I would like to a modern version of Tagore’s Sanyasi, which I can see through and through, or a modern version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which I can also envision. But how to find 12 actors?  It’s sad when the logistics defeat you, and you have to do plays with one or two actors.  It is difficult to make money on our kind of plays unless there is a tour. I always pay my team; I remember Manav Kaul, who did backstage for one of my plays in Pune saying that the Rs 500 I paid him was his first theatre ki kamaai (earning from theatre.)”

The work he considers most precious, is with children and young people; before it became a trend for theatre practitioners to work with schools and colleges, Jaimini was involved with it. He wrote a lot of short plays for children, as well as one full-length play,Once Upon A Tiger, about wildlife conservation, which was funded by Bittu Sahgal (well known conservationist), who also gave the group a place to rehearse in a city nature park.  “I find it easier, or rather less intimidating to write for kids than for an adult audience. Also, I am not disciplined enough to be a writer. It is a very difficult craft and the best writers just write everyday whether they are in the mood or not. I remember reading somewhere that children who do theatre in middle school, grow up to be less aggressive or have fewer anti-social tendencies. Sadly, hardly any plays are being written for children in India.”

Meanwhile, resisting the urge to run an assembly line production company, and rediscovering himself as an actor with web series, he continues to be energized by Mahadevbhai, which after 350 shows, still checks all the boxes he looks for in an ideal production. “I can do it even when I am 75. Earlier I was a young man playing an older character; then I can be an old actor playing a younger man.”

(This piece first appeared in The Hindu Friday Review on April 5, 2019)

Every Brilliant Thing

Pursuit Of Happiness

How can a play about depression be warm, funny and inspiring?  Duncan Macmillan and Johnny Donahue come up with the answer through Every Brilliant Thing—a one-man show that’s simple, yet complex, with a wonderful device that helps draw the audience right into the life of the protagonist, and also ensures that every show is different. 

The play has had successful runs in many places; Quasar Thakore Padamsee has directed an Indian version with a perfectly cast Vivek Madan, and just minor tweaks to the text. It is important for this play that the actor have a cheerful and affable personality, with the kind of aura that makes people drop their inhibitions, because of the interactivity that’s cleverly built into it. 

Before the show starts, the actor—dressed in casual clothes—walks around handing chits of paper to random and some carefully selected, members of the audience. The chits have a number and some words that he asks them to say out loud and clear when he calls the number.

The story begins with a child too young to understand depression or suicide, he just knows from his taciturn father, that she is in hospital because she is unhappy and “did something stupid.”  He decides to make a list of every “brilliant” thing he can think of—starting with ice-cream (which is #1 and the person in the show who gets to shout it out, involuntarily smiles and makes everyone else smile too)—that give joy, and leaves it on her pillow.  She does not mention it, but he knows she has read it, because she has corrected his spelling.  

As the list grows—and the words of happy-making things are shouted out from different corners of the auditorium, because the audience is seated in the round—there is a sense of shared experience that is sharper than usual. And even though there are layers of melancholy in the story, they are always tinged with optimism and humour.

Whenever Madan needs another character—whether it’s the father, a doctor, a girl in the library with whom he falls in love, he simply enlists one from the audience. When he wants an object—a jacket, a pen or a book, somebody in the audience lends it. If the book happens to be (in one of the shows) The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a F***-- it just make the scene funnier.

The original list grows to a million things, ideas, experiences, even abstract notions, all of which convey the message that life is worth living, because there are a million reasons to be happy.  Maybe sentimental and simplistic, but  Duncan Macmillan and Johnny Donahue, and Quasar Thakore Padamsee and Vivek Madan convince you by the end of the show, that it’s true.