Niranjan Goswami carries more than a bit of his stage persona even off screen. Even with ears shut, one could grasp some of what he says from the expressions on his face and his body language. One of the pioneers of the art of pantomime, or simply mime, in the country, Goswami sees his art as the perfect medium of expression in a country like India.
“Mime can be a very powerful medium, particularly in a multi-lingual country like ours. Because, wherever you, be it east or west of the country, there is no language barrier. It also means that my market will be bigger,” says the Padmi Shri award winner in an interview with The Hindu.
He is in the city to participate in the National Mime Festival organised by the Bharat Bhavan, in association with the Department of Youth Affairs and The Mimers, Thiruvananthapuram. On Friday evening, the festival opened with Goswami’s Indian Mime Theatre performing the mime ‘Umbrella’.
College days
Goswami got attracted to the art form during his school and college days, when he caught performances by local groups.
“As a student, I watched a mime performance. It stayed in my mind, the way one person communicated everything without uttering a word. When we started out in the 1960s, everyone was saying that mime is a European art. In the initial days, we too copied those existing styles. Later, we developed these techniques based on works like Natyashasthra and made it into the contemporary Indian form. First it was a hobby, later it became a profession and then I devoted my entire life to the art,” he says.
For developing an Indian form for ‘mime’, he imbibed lessons from myriad art forms, adapting gestures from one and techniques from another. In the monsoon of 1980, he stayed for a month in the Kerala Kalamandalam in Cheruthuruthy, “studying the training methods from morning to evening.”
“I watched all this to develop my own methods. I incorporated so many things from other arts. Many of it happens subconsciously. Poetry, folk tales, short stories, dramas or just about anything can be a source of inspiration,” says Goswami, who has made mimes based on dramas like Badal Sircar’s Beej and Girish Karnad’s Nagamandal. Compared to the time during which he began practising the art, he fells that mime has attained much popularity and acceptance these days, as evident from the competitions at school and college levels and the Government’s scholarships and salary grants.
“Through our work, we established this art. The government then understood that this is important and began supporting it,” he says.