The performances by the NSD students were middling and the play needed to be tightened.In the very first years of his life, Asif Ali Haider inherited theatre. In a faded memory, he is toddling backstage while the air is full of the Spartas’ cry for freedom in Spartacus and the odour of cheap make-up. “The make-up, that smell. In those days, there used to be a make-up mask; it was an inexpensive tube for theatre makeup. That smell, even today, works as a kick for me. If I go to backstage and get a whiff of that smell, I feel the need to get on stage immediately and do something,” says Haider.
At National School of Drama (NSD), where he studied and, now, teaches, the lawns are awash in the sunshine on the bitterly cold December afternoon. Ignoring the benches, Haider plonks himself on the grass. Just a few days ago, he had watched his adapted script of Berolt Brecht’s Turandot enacted at the NSD’s hall, Abhimanch. The plot revolves around a Chinese emperor who is manipulating the cotton market, his dissatisfied subjects and a revolutionary rising in the background. The emperor invites the intellectuals or, as Brecht called them, the “tui”, to court to find solutions to the cotton crisis. The best tui will win the hand of the princess Turandot; the rest would lose their heads.
During the past decade, there has been a lack of new Hindi writing for theatre.The performances by the NSD students were middling and the play needed to be tightened, but Haider managed to capture Brecht’s balance of uproarious comedy and scathing satire. He also made the story resound with contemporary events, especially the toppling of institutions and attack on intellectuals. In one scene, a student stands before the head of his teacher mounted on a spike and says, “You were a master of grammar. Why did you talk in court about things you do not specialise in?”
Haider laughs as he draws parallels with real life. “The problem with intellectuals is that we want to talk about a lot of things. That’s why we become miserable and fail,” he says, adding that he had not read Turandot, one of Brecht’s unfinished plays and less known, until Robin Das, who directed this production, called him. “The moment I saw his call, I tried to avoid because I knew he will want to make me write something and I was busy,” he says. Das had been his teacher and, eventually, Haider took on Turandot.
In one scene, a student stands before the head of his teacher mounted on a spike.This has been a pattern in Haider’s career that turned him towards playwriting. Haider has become the go-to person for playwriting by directors. When he was in the second year until which he had not written a thing, another Brecht play, The Good Woman of Setzuan was going to be staged and the designated playwright couldn’t deliver the script as his mother was ill. “Somehow, everybody in my class felt that I was the person to adapt the play for us to perform,” he says. He did. Directed by Bansi Kaul, the play was titled Door Gaon ki Bhali Aurat and included folk art forms from Dang district of Gujarat. When he was at the NSD Repertory, Haider was playing the lead in a play to be devised from the novel Anamdas ka Pota by Hazari Prasad Dwivedi. The plan to devise the script wasn’t working so Das, who was directing it, called upon Haider to adapt the novel. “It was a complex piece of work. The novel dealt with Indian philosophy, among others, there were multiple characters, locations and meta-narratives. Internet wasn’t commonly used so I would have t sit in the library for hours reading up on Vedanta and other thoughts,” he recalls. The script was a resounding success, especially among Hindi writers. “For the first time, I thought, ‘Maybe, I can write,’” he says. His grandfather used to be a poet and his childhood reading had a high literary content, such as the works of Tagore and Premchand. “Even the comics I was given had a literary angle to it,” he says.
During the past decade, there has been a lack of new Hindi writing for theatre. Ashgar Wajahat was among the few still active when Haider started out as a playwright but stalwarts such as Bhisham Sayni had passed away and Surendra Verma was tilting towards novels. “Maybe that’s why I began to be called upon much more and became prominent before my time,” says Haider In the last decade, he has written 30 plays, among them
What drives his writing? “Irritation,” he answers, “If I am not irritated, I cannot write.” The Gujarat riots fuelled his play, Saaye Humsaaye, Turandot, in a scene that was edited out of the performance, has an ironmonger trying to hoard books and documents as a means of preserving knowledge for the future generations. A play he is writing dwells with a question of bonging and ownership. “Who does the and belong to? Who owns a home or a country?” asks Haider. The central protagonist of this play is an elephant, an animal present in a variety of traditions in India.
Haider has appeared on stage, famously as Jawaharlal Nehru in Azad Maulana, and directed plays for the NSD students. But, his writings are better known. “When I started writing, a teacher of one had said, ‘Be careful that you don’t lose your acting,’” says Haider. The playwright can see the irony in that.
