Abstract: Bombay Gnanam (Gnanam Balasubramanian) started the all-women Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group (MLDG) in 1989. It hasn’t been easy for the women to take time from family responsibilities, but they make the time because the troupe provides a space for them to talk about their issues with other women as well as a creative outlet through which they can act on stage. The MLDG has made a niche for itself in the male-oriented sabha theatre scene in Chennai, gaining acceptance as well as praise from even respected male Hindu religious leaders. I discuss the story of the MLDG and argue that their own identities as educated, affluent middle-class Brahmin women along with strategic storytelling and staging methods has allowed them to not only avoid censure but to become popular with the conservative, traditional Brahmin community in Chennai while bringing controversial topics to the stage. They have developed strategies over the years that range from basic cross-dressing to criticizing the actions and attitudes of other women, presenting all perspectives to an issue, leaving the plays without resolution so that audiences can insert their own values, and recently allowing male voices onto the stage through recordings.
Keywords: Mahalakshmi Ladies Drma Group (MLDG), lady drama group, female character, male voices, devotional plays, widow remarriage, Brahmin women, Tamil Brahmin community
Introduction
In the 1980s, Gnanam Balasubramanian, or Bombay Gnanam as she is commonly known, read a comment in a newspaper article in which leading Tamil theatre practitioners in Chennai like R. S. Manohar and Komal Swaminathan stated that it was “not possible” for women to write, act, and be fully involved in Tamil theatre. She took it as a challenge and started the all-women Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group (MLDG) in Bombay with a group of her housewife friends in 1989 partly to prove them wrong (Santhanam, 2003). It hasn’t been easy for the women to find the time away from their family responsibilities, but the troupe has done well over the last twenty-six years, bringing mixed gender audiences to performances about women’s issues and drawing attention to women’s struggles as well as to their talents. Gnanam and a number of the other members migrated to Chennai in the mid-1990s and have made a niche for themselves in the very male-oriented sabha theatre scene there.1 Bombay Gnanam is the only playwright and director in the troupe, though she does include input from the others, and they have produced nineteen plays in over four hundred productions. Seventeen of those plays deal with women’s issues and the two most recent are bhakti, or devotional plays. In this article, I discuss the story of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group and argue that their own identities as affluent middle-class Brahmin women along with strategic storytelling and staging methods has allowed them to not only avoid censure, but also to become popular with the conservative, traditional Brahmin community in Chennai (even the men) while bringing to the stage all manner of controversial topics.
Bombay Gnanam and the Sabha Theatre
In some ways, Gnanam has fit in easily to the sabha theatre system in Chennai. Sabhas are voluntary cultural organizations that sponsor performances in the city through the fees of their members. They are best known for their sponsorship of classical music and dance performances, particularly during the December-January Music Festival of Madras. As I explain elsewhere, “Sabha members are generally middle-class Tamil Brahmins, a community that is notorious for its social conservatism as well as for its high levels of education and appreciation of traditional culture” (Rudisill, 2012, 277). They provide the auditorium and bring ready-made audiences to the plays, usually also selling tickets to the public to offset the expense of paying the troupe a fixed fee. It is incredibly difficult to produce a Tamil play in Chennai without their support (although occasionally a university, corporation, or other group will provide funding and a performance space). This means that the sabha organizers have a lot of influence and control over the content and format of plays that are produced in the city. Gnanam grew up in an orthodox Brahmin family near Mayavaram in the Tanjore District of Tamilnadu and has a deep understanding of this community as well as what will be appreciated by them on stage. She knows how far she can push on different issues without offending her viewers and is rarely controversial (partly because she adheres to gender norms both in her personal life and in her plays), even if her themes of choice are.
The plays promoted through the sabhas tend to fall into one of the two categories: comic or serious. Gnanam’s plays are of the “serious” variety, tackling social themes and having a primary goal of opening discussions about sensitive topics and a secondary goal of influencing people’s thinking about them. She often includes some comedy to lighten the mood and entertain, not just educate, viewers, but this is not the main genre of the work. Her plays have addressed such issues as dowry harassment, the problems of working women, suicides, child marriages, widow remarriage, artificial insemination, adoption, surrogacy, mercy killings, the communication gap between husband and wife, immigration, postnatal depression, divorce, homosexuality, and the trend of unmarried couples living together. She says that “Dramas should hold up a mirror to society. Even if a handful of people go home thinking about what they have seen, I have achieved my goal” (Natarajan, 2015a). While the topics may be sensitive, they are issues that people are familiar with, if not from within their own families, then from their communities or the newspapers or television. Sindhu vijayakumar asked Gnanam once, “Hailing from a very orthodox family, what makes [you] take up pro-women issues?” (2008) which is clearly perceived to be quite radical. She responded “My themes have eighty percent truth in them. As I deal with thought-provoking, current and relevant family issues, people are able to identify with it. Besides, I refuse to give in to any pressure to do scenes and deliver dialogues that are not acceptable for my conscience” (vijayakumar, 2008). Since her own conscience is very much in line with the culture in which she was brought up, she rarely pushes anything too far out of the comfort zone of her conservative Brahmin audience.
The characters of sabha plays are usually meant to be everyday people, though, as I state elsewhere, perhaps more exaggerated and flamboyant than their non-fictional counterparts, and there are, of course, exceptions. Female characters in MLDG plays dress just like those in other sabha plays. One of the characteristics of the genre is that “the characters . . . are ordinary folk and they dress in ordinary clothes” (Rudisill, 2012, 286). So the female characters will be in saris, salwar kameez, nighties, or a kurta and jeans while the male characters wear shirt and pants, veshti, or a lungi, and in the MLDG, the performers are very often responsible for supplying and maintaining their own costumes.
Part of the goal of the MLDG plays is, as Gnanam says, to show “reality” and characters that the audiences will recognize and be sympathetic to. In an interview with M. Rajini, she said that
It requires great courage to enact such sensitive themes on the stage. It has to be subtle but the message should be clear; I was walking on eggshells. I was never worried about social acceptance of such plays. My stories only reflected reality. We have a social responsibility to educate our audience. I don’t believe in just tickling the audience with X-rated jokes which are in bad taste. (Rajini, 2015)
There is some contradiction in this statement. On the one hand, Gnanam has to be very careful about what she says, walking on eggshells so as not to draw too much criticism or drive away audiences while still managing to educate them about women’s issues. She admits that “When we staged Ellai Illatha Illaram (“Household Without Boundaries”)2 which was on unmarried couples living together, viewers in the moffusil areas [outside of the city] asked me whether I was trying to corrupt the youth” (Santhanam, 2003). On the other hand, since her plays reflect the reality that audience members can see around them, she isn’t worried about the social acceptance of her work. As I spoke at length with Padmini Natarajan, who was one of the founding members of the MLDG and is still very much involved, although she is no longer on stage, I could see how well this strategy has worked.
Creating Plays
Natarajan explained the process of creating a play. She says that first, Gnanam will read about or hear about some instance and become interested in it. She will sit down with her family, including her husband, sons, and daughters-in-law, to analyze it and see what everyone thinks. Without her husband’s active and visible support, it is unlikely that she would have been accepted and encouraged by the rest of the community as she is, so this is important. After hearing his thoughts, she will bring it to the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group for discussion. The MLDG grew out of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Club, and Natarajan says that there is still something of the social aspect of a ladies club about it:
The rehearsals were great fun always. We let loose. We could talk about anything. Because there was no question of social stigma attached to it or nobody said, ‘How can you think like that?’ And we dealt with very very sensitive issues in all our plays. Sensitive issues in terms of the middle class mentality in a closed society. In terms of, like, you know, gay marriages or surrogacy or adoption, divorce. We’ve handled every subject . . . In this group, through the plays, we have been able to come out with the arguments, the pros and cons of the situation and we have been able to present it to other women. And men. And we also have been able to think about it. To rationalize it, to evolve strategies or evolve arguments for or against. (Natarajan, 2015b)
The troupe provides a space in which women can talk about whatever they want and have fun doing it. They talk about things they read, things they hear, and things that happen to them, and this can all happen within the private and woman-centred space of the home or rehearsal hall, away from “the oppression of family obligations” (Weidman, 2006, 139-140). Natarajan mentioned to me how some of the women have gone through troubles in their personal lives and found answers to their problems in the plays. All viewpoints and experiences are welcome in these discussions, because all together they help Gnanam put together a story that includes multiple perspectives on a topic. Very often, the ending of the plays is left open, with no resolution, which means that no particular point of view is seen as the right answer and privileged. Instead, as Natarajan puts it,
Quite a bit Gnanam leaves it to the audience to decide whether you want to . . . You know, the ending was what you would like it to be. You know? Sometimes it’s a question. She just throws a question. And she says, you decide. You tell me. And very often, after the performance, when the curtain calls are on, people in the audience get up and give an answer . . . We’ve had arguments, we’ve had fights from the audience. How could you do this? You know? It’s been very interesting, the way that the audience gets worked up about this whole issue, whatever the issue is that you have been handling or talking about. (Natarajan, 2015b)
So part of the strategy for staying within the conservative values of the audience, and those of the affluent, educated, middle class families of the performers themselves, was simply to not take sides. The plays thus always align with the values of the audience as if each member can write his/her own ending. For example, in Aarambam (Fresh Beginnings, c. 1998) on widow remarriage, audiences expected that Gnanam would come out in favor of widow remarriage. Instead, she leaves it open. At the end, the widow turns to the audiences and says “Is it necessary for me to marry? Is there no life without marriage, without a partner? What should I do? You tell me what should I do?” (Natarajan, 2015b). There is no sense of what the playwright believes to be the right thing for this character, or for any other woman in her situation.
There is a clear sense of what the “woman’s side” of an issue is versus the “man’s side,” and Gnanam’s quality, of not wanting to take a stand for the woman’s side, as well as the fact that this troupe is all-women in some ways by default— they would not have been permitted by their families to have acted with men— makes me hesitate to call the MLDG “feminist” theatre. The group’s work does, however, share quite a lot with feminist theatres around the world, and of course everyone has his/her own way of being a feminist. Tiina Rosenberg writes that “The truly innovative aspect of feminist performance has been, and still is, the position of subject from which a feminist is able to speak and make statements” (Rosenberg, 2007, 85). The members of the MLDG speak out as subjects to address women’s issues, but they also want to include what they think of as men’s perspectives, and employ cross-dressing to accomplish this. Marjorie Garber talks about how “The appeal of cross-dressing is clearly related to its status as a sign of the constructedness of gender categories” (Garber, 1992, 9). In the context of the MLDG, where everyone knows that the male characters are cross-dressed women, and there is no attempt at actually passing as the opposite gender, this staged construction of gender gives women a space in which they can play with gender stereotypes with impunity while still being protected from accusations of transgression. There has been much scholarship on the way the notion of an ideal Indian womanhood has been connected to middle-class status, Indian nationalism, modernity, and particularly the performing arts of classical music and dance.3 These connections have made it more difficult for women who wish to keep their reputations as good, middle-class women to go against traditional gender roles in their everyday lives. Already these women are somewhat subversive simply because they are acting on stage in a play, but this is mitigated to an extent by the fact that they are acting with women and including what would naturally be considered as the male point of view in the story line. Rosenberg writes that “Performance has been, and remains, a means of politicising and portraying the anger and frustration felt by many feminists. Feminist and queer insights are based on the awareness that something is wrong in the world” (Rosenberg, 2007, 84). The MLDG is pointing out situations and attitudes that are problematic in society, but they are not overtly about politics, anger, or solutions.
The very first play of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group was extremely personal for Bombay Gnanam, as it concerned the issue of dowry harassment, and grew out of her older sister’s experience. Sindhikka Vaitha Streedhanam (The Dowry that Made You Think, 1989) drew on the story of “This sister [who] had never lived with her husband and had been sent back to her parents’ establishment after being ill-treated by her in-laws. Gnanam began to question the system that put a freeze on a young woman’s life and longings because of custom and tradition” (Natarajan, 2015c). This play’s resolution was left open, though the narrative leading up to it was a sad one. The girl was killed by her mother-in-law, who had been shamed by her friends for choosing a bride for her son whose father couldn’t even provide a pair of diamond earrings as a dowry, being a simple clerk. Many years later, the mother-in-law repented her wickedness and offered her son in marriage to that girl’s handicapped sister, who left open to the audience the question of whether or not she should accept the proposal. Natarajan related that after each performance people would talk to Gnanam either in person or on the phone about their and their daughters’ experiences of being victimised by continued demands for money, jewelry, vehicles, or property. Sometimes, distraught parents would call asking for advice and a solution to this problem.
This was the first play Bombay Gnanam wrote, but not the first play she acted in. A few years earlier, she had played the wife of Saint Thyagaraja for the Matunga Dramatic Society where she worked with S. R. Kasturi and learned a lot about direction, sets, and other production aspects that was invaluable when she launched her own drama group. That was her only real preparation for the venture, as she says that “I have absolutely no formal training in acting, direction or playwriting!” (Santhanam, 2003). The name of the troupe comes from the Mahalakshmi Ladies Club, of which Gnanam was a member in Mumbai. She says “I sent an open invitation to those who were interested in acting and we got a huge response” (Vijayan, 2014). She then held auditions where hopefuls read from her script on dowry. She says, “Since it was my first venture, I was a bit scared myself. Will the person fit into this role? Will they cooperate? I believed that it was not enough if they are interested for just one day. There will be times when they have to come for rehearsals three months continuously” (Vijayan, 2014). After selecting the original fifteen members and rehearsing diligently, she publicly staged the play in Bombay, where “it turned out to be a hit” (Santhanam, 2003).
Negotiating Controversial Topics
Gnanam wrote and produced her first eight plays in Mumbai, where popular Chennai comedian S. ve. Shekher saw a show. With his support, the MLDG visited Chennai in 1991 and put on six productions. Gnanam appreciated that Shekher “took efforts to introduce us to Madras audiences” (Santhanam, 2003), and returned to the city to perform in 1994, then she permanently relocated there in 1996. One of the plays they performed in Chennai in 1991 was Gnanam’s second play, Akkarai Pachchai (The Other Side of the River is Green), in which a family found an American bridegroom for their daughter. This play showed “the alienation of the daughter, her inability to see her parents and her final demise far away from her family and people” (Natarajan, 2015c). This was an issue very close to the audience members, as many sabha-goers have relatives that have emigrated to the US for school, work, or marriage. One of the actresses of the MLDG I met in 2003 had two children in the US herself, and clearly had a lot of thoughts on the subject. The fears expressed in the play were very present, especially for those sending their daughters abroad without strong networks for them to join. They worried about their daughters’ happiness and safety, but also about the values of grandchildren raised abroad and the possible loss of tradition. Natarajan recalls that “one gentleman in the audience started a huge argument that was very aggressive. He claimed that we were projecting a false image and that many families had flourished with the migration to greener shores” (Natarajan, 2015d). Clearly the subject touched a lot of people and unearthed some very deep feelings about an issue that many affluent Tamil Brahmin families grapple with.
While topics concerning female health and reproduction are central to several plays, Gnanam’s female characters are not flirtatious or inappropriate (according to Tamil values) in any way. While she may challenge what she sees as problematic traditions or attitudes that oppress women, she is herself quite socially conservative, and this is reflected in her theatrical work. She says that “I too feel that we should not let go tradition in certain issues. My plays are all centred round women, but they do not blindly project the woman’s point of view. Paasathin Parimanam (“The Dynamics of Affection”) was in support of men” (Santhanam, 2003). This play questioned the widely held idea that daughters are more emotionally attached to their parents than sons by focusing on the love of a son for his parents. She also criticizes women in her 2011 play Saswatham (“The Eternal Values”), which “aims to take a sharp critical look at the economically independent, career minded women of today . . . those who consider themselves liberated but whose obsession with being successful and independent makes them highly arrogant” (Santhanam, 2011). Elsewhere, she criticizes young women who “misuse the freedom they have” by not adjusting for the sake of their marriages (Santhanam, 2003) as well as women depicted in reality television and serials that rely on “skimpy dresses, double entendres and villainy” (Vijayakumar, 2008). So although she says “I am bothered about the atrocities against women and girls. I want to work among village people and empower them” (Vijayakumar, 2008) and “I would like to stage plays which would throw light on the domestic problems of rural women and educate them about their rights” (Lalithasai, 2012), she also has a very clear idea about how women should behave in order to earn the respect of both other women and men. The politics of normal female behavior in Tamil society clash in this case with female agency and ideas about modernity.
Women Performing on the Public Stage
While the Tamil stage is more open to women than it was twenty-six years ago, it is still difficult for women of the caste and class of the majority of the MLDG members to perform on stage with men without some risk to their reputation. Gnanam said in 2012 “Three decades ago, it was not easy for women to act in plays. The family members, however, did not mind the women acting with their own gender. This is the reason why my troupe members are only women” (Lalithasai). Things have changed over the years, but not substantially, which is partly why so many women want to be involved with this group, and stay involved for extended periods of time. An article from the UCA News, a Catholic news source in Asia, responded to the 1994 MLDG performances in Chennai that “A ‘woman only’ drama troupe is the latest move by some Bombay women to assert their equality in a male-dominated society. A few decades ago, drama troupes were composed of only men. Even the female characters were represented by men” (Women Stage Plays in Former Male Theatric Domain, 1994). This isn’t true in the case of sabha theatre. The genre started in the early 1950s and many of the earliest troupes, most notably the United Amateur Artists started by Y. Gee. Parthasarathy in 1952, involved female actresses from the very beginning. This is the group with which a young J. Jayalalitha, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, got her start in acting. A few troupes did use all male artistes, though. R. Neelakanthan, who has acted with Cho Ramasamy’s viveka Fine Arts since its founding in 1954, told me that when they started the troupe, some of the boys’ families protested because they did not want their sons to be “spoiled” by working with lady artistes. So they were the only sabha troupe that didn’t have women up through the late 1960s, instead using “the two best-looking men”(very often Cho himself) for the female roles in the plays. Neelakanthan says that this made it difficult for them to get bookings with sabhas that primarily staged plays in North Madras, where actresses were expected. Women acting on stage with men for audiences that included men was an issue even as late as the early 1980s for the especially orthodox. S. ve. Shekher shared an anecdote about a performance at that time, when “Kumudam, a Tamil weekly, wanted us to perform at their campus for their employees. It was on a big condition that no lady should participate in the play. We agreed. We asked one of our boys in the group to do the lady’s role. The play went off very well” (Gopalie, 2002, 220-221). Because of the stigma associated with women acting on stage, it is still a challenge to find actresses for sabha theatre, and plays tend to range between zero and three female characters. Sometimes Cho Ramasamy would play a female character if there were not enough actresses available to stage the play otherwise. There are several actresses who work with a few different sabha troupes, and they command rates that are three times those of the male actors. Other troupes now have family members or friends who will act the female characters, but only for that particular troupe where they are guaranteed the safety of both their bodies and their reputations.
The Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group has continued for twenty-six years as an all-female amateur troupe, with women playing all the male roles in their plays, and this novelty is clearly one of the reasons that audiences are so fascinated by their work. Marjorie Garber talks about how “passing [as a different gender] has both its secret pleasure and its cultural effect” (Garber, 1992, 9). In this case, however, like with the cross-dressing males of Shakespeare’s time, although there is a discussion of the veracity of the performances, there is never a question about passing, because audiences already know that all members of the MLDG are women. There is pleasure as well as humor involved in watching women dressed as and acting like men, which I argue offsets some of the possible controversy of the topics of the plays. Before most reviewers, bloggers, or other artistes talk about the content of the MLDG plays, they remark on the fact that the group is all women, and there is an indulgent and patronizing attitude that this is more interesting than anything the women could actually have to say. This likely gives the troupe a little more leeway to push boundaries on sensitive topics than if the group actually included male actors. Because of the gender of the actors, the MLDG plays are generally the opposite of the normal sabha play, with most of the characters being women. Bombay Gnanam’s 2011 play Saswatham (about surrogacy, abortion, and the need for male heirs) didn’t have any male characters, just referred to them in the dialogue and brought in perspectives generally perceived as male through the voices of women speaking for them. Her more recent devotional plays have nearly all male characters, which has presented new challenges that I will discuss shortly. One of the advantages of an all-female troupe is that it made it much easier to find actresses than if there had also been male members in the group. While there are still six original members, a lot of women have come and gone for various reasons, and to date around two hundred different women “from a newborn baby to a 90 year old lady” (Natarajan, 2015b) have been involved in the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group in some capacity. This is both an amazing resource, with a huge pool of talent to choose from, and a struggle, as it means that there is always someone who needs training. Another issue has been getting people to take them seriously and be willing to sponsor performances. “As a women’s group, Gnanam says they had to face many challenges. ‘We could not approach anyone easily. Initially, there were even a few who asked what a group of ladies can possibly do?’ she says” (vijayan, 2014). They used their club connections to get their start in Mumbai, then popular male theatre artist S. ve. Shekher paved their way in Chennai. Now the reputation and success of Gnanam and the troupe speak for themselves. Gnanam has been honored with a number of prestigious theatre awards over the years, including the Nataka Choodamani award from the Krishna Gana Sabha, Mylapore Academy awards, the Kalamamani award, the vani Kala Sudhakara by vani Mahal, and the Nataka Padmam by Brahma Gana Sabha. Even R. S. Manohar, who had earlier commented that women couldn’t be totally involved in theatre and inspired the start of the MLDG, congratulated her on her work, which she counts among her proudest moments (vijayakumar, 2008).
The main struggle, however, is in the nature of working exclusively with housewives, because it can be difficult for them to control their own schedules enough to commit to make it to all the rehearsals. So this dedication is one of the main criteria for actresses looking to join the group. Gnanam says that “It is tough to consistently produce plays featuring only women. Most of my actors are housewives and there are great demands on their time. In-laws can also be quite hostile to the idea of their appearing on stage and spending so much time away from the family” (Santhanam, 2003). In some cases, their “husbands manage their homes in their wives absence” (Women Stage Plays in Former Male Theatric Domain, 1994), which means that the actresses need a lot of cooperation and flexibility from their husbands and in-laws. On the other hand, “Our members are educated and talented homemakers. This is a creative outlet for talented homemakers” (vijayakumar, 2008). In this sense, it is clearly a pleasure to work with women who are excited for the rare opportunity and prepared to work hard to perform well. Natarajan is still astounded by the loyalty and dedication of the troupe members, saying “I mean, imagine a woman’s organization and we don’t get paid. We don’t get paid a penny. It’s completely voluntary. People come for rehearsal, people spend money, come from great distances, spend time coming for rehearsals” (Natarajan, 2015b). I had the opportunity to see the second ever performance of the 2003 play Nallathor Veenai Seithey (The Beautifully Made Veena), which addresses the issue of divorce and its effects on children. My field notes specifically mention how impressed I was by how well they knew it and how evident the amount of rehearsal time was.
With such a wide variety of women being involved, most of whom having little to no acting training or experience despite possessing some classical music or dance training, which is common for women from the Tamil Brahmin community, there is little consistency, in terms of actors, for Bombay Gnanam to work with. She says, “Also for a lady, doing a male role on stage is not easy. We manage the costume and I teach them the mannerism, but we cannot do anything about the voice” (vijayan, 2014). Seeing women in drag is clearly part of the pleasure audiences take in watching the plays, as much of the conversation amongst the audience afterwards will concern the veracity of their performances. Gnanam used to look for a particular body type for her male roles, saying that “To play the role of a man, one needs to be tall, have broad shoulders and a masculine walk” (Lalithasai, 2012). Three years later, she had changed her mind about the importance of body type, saying earlier this year that “The action will speak for the character; stature does not matter much. I am also open to anyone who has a passion to act. There is no discrimination. I am confident of molding anyone who shows involvement” (Rajini, 2015). The voice, however, remained a problem, becoming more so with the troupe’s first devotional play in 2014.
The Move to Devotional Plays
The last two plays of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Troupe have diverged significantly from their previous work in three major ways. 2014’s Sri Bodendhral and 2015’s Bhaja Govindam both have spiritual themes instead of dealing with women’s issues, involve the dubbing of dialogue, and are not ticketed. Rather than selling tickets for these plays with religious subjects, the troupe presents them for free and solicits donations from viewers. “Gnanam said at the curtain call . . . that though city sabhas funded the first few runs of the shows, people who watch it must do two things— spread the word even using Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp and donate their mite” (Bombay Gnanam’s New Play). The actors stand near the door with boxes in which people can drop their donations. People have been very generous with their donations, and the grand scale of the plays with their expensive custom sets, costumes, and studio recordings has been manageable. The understanding of the importance of technology in advertising is ironic because Gnanam herself does not use any of these platforms; she doesn’t even text message or email regularly.
MLDG’s most recent play, Bhaja Govindam (2015) is “about the teachings of Adi Sankara as conveyed by Sri Chandrasekarendra Saraswati Swamigal” (venkataramanan, 2015). The troupe came up with the idea of Sri Bodendhral, partly thanks to the influence of Gnanam’s husband, as a way to mark their Silver Jubilee (twenty-five year anniversary of their founding in 1989), then were given the directive by Sri Jayendra Sarawati to produce a play about Adi Shankara. Gnanam puts it like this:
We had planned Sri Bodendhral and wanted to get the blessing of the Acharyas of the Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam. But trepidation that the idea might not be received well prevented us from going to Kanchipuram. After mentally making the offering we went ahead with the play. On learning about it through Mutt sources, the Acharyas sent their blessings through a devotee (Venkataramanan, 2015).
After that, the troupe did go to the Mutt, where Sri Jayendra Sarawati gave Bombay Gnanam a book and told her, “Let this be your next subject.” She says that “the title was hidden by the kumkum and when I gently pushed it to the side I realised it was Adi Sankara. We decided to enact the subject on a grand scale, costs notwithstanding. It is a privilege to showcase the life and teachings of one of the greatest Hindu savants” (Venkataramanan, 2015). The new religious plays are receiving a lot of press and attention, all of it positive, and from the reviews both in newspapers and on individuals’ blogs, it seems that the auditoriums are packed with viewers. Sri Bodendhral has been performed well over fifty times to date. The 2015 review of Bhaja Govindam in the Mylapore Times suggests that the subject matter of the play is one with which the audience is already familiar, confirming that the audience mostly consists of members of the conservative Hindu Brahmin community commonly associated with sabhas.
Image 1. Climax scene from Bhaja Govindam. Courtesy of Padmini Natarajan
These recent religious plays are right on trend with what has been happening in the sabhas over the last few years, where there has been a resurgence of religious and historical plays. Often the religious plays involve some humor (such as those staged by United Amateur Artists and Dummies Drama), but the MLDG plays don’t seem to be very funny, with audience members commenting things like “The huge hall [Narada Gana Sabha] was full and had in it, devotees of this saint [Nama Bodendral] who were kept in their reverential mode throughout the event” (Aarvalan, 2014). And (of Bhaja Govindam) “I must say I was transported to a world of piety, prayers, mantras, swamijis, philosophy, so much so, my evening was filled with a meaning and a purpose” (Rajaram, 2015). However, Gnanam has not neglected her roots and still includes a social aspect by weaving in the story of a modern day couple with the past narrative of the saint’s life story. The idea is to take “the deep philosophy of Advaita” (Natarajan, 2015c) and make it easy for ordinary people to understand and thus demonstrate its relevance to those living today.
The most revolutionary aspect of the two religious plays, however, is the pre-recording of dialogue, sound effects, and music. Blogger Aarvalan wrote a review of Bodhendral for Sabhash! in which he states
Another noteworthy element was this – the resorting to the method of a path-breaking synchronization in the delivery of dialogue. The actors never actually uttered a single word while they were on stage. Instead, their miming of words occurred in unison with a taped version that kept running in the background. They matched word for word, perfectly. And this, as Gnanam rightly pointed out, demanded the understanding and commitment of all the performers. And these were a good 45 odd in number. No mean achievement this! (Aarvalan, 2014).
Although he exaggerates the number of actresses (Naveena Vijayan of the Indian Express put the number at thirty), the point is still valid. Gnanam has done a few films and acts regularly on television4 so she is familiar with the processes of playback singing and dubbing from those media. I have heard a number of different reasons for the move to dub the soundtrack for these two plays in particular. When I spoke with Divakar Subramanian at the School for Indian Film Music in Chennai, who has done all the recording and even supplied some of the voices for Gnanam’s recent plays, he mentioned the importance of clarity and consistency, especially with the music in these plays (Subramanian, 2015). However, when I spoke with Padmini Natarajan, I heard a different story: “She [Gnanam] brought in the male voices. Again, kowtowing to the larger good. Because it’s Veda. The Vedas, the religious texts that are being chanted. That are being taught. In both of these plays there is a lot of this. So she did not want the criticism that women are doing this. Women were not supposed to do it, women are not doing it now, and women are fighting to do it. Okay. But she said that the intention of the play is to carry the message of the play.” (Natarajan, 2015b) So even though she acknowledges that women are “fighting” to speak the Vedas in their own voices, Gnanam did not wish to distract audiences from the message of the plays by giving them the opportunity to focus on that debate and her overturning of tradition by allowing the women to do so in her production. To have the women speak the Vedas would be a huge political statement and invite a lot of criticism. The MLDG’s history has been, in part, about pushing norms about both what women can do and what women can talk about, especially in public. They have deliberately tackled controversial topics and that has been a core component of the group’s identity. However, while they have broached these subjects in public, they have circumvented some of the more difficult politics by presenting the hegemonic position and making sure to never completely undermine it. That isn’t possible in this case, where the very presence of a woman’s voice would undermine tradition and make a statement that couldn’t be retracted or even mitigated.
The Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group is right now at a crossroads. Will they choose to follow this more conservative path they are on at the moment, or go back to being controversial and provocative? Today, the MLDG is synonymous with Bombay Gnanam. If she chooses to stay with the religious themes, which seems likely, it wouldn’t surprise me if another amateur women’s theatre group started to pick up where the MLDG left off with addressing social issues. There are clearly a lot of middle-class Brahmin women interested in acting and in talking about the issues that concern them most, and they will be left without a venue if the MLDG discontinues producing plays on women’s issues. It will, however, require someone (or a group of someones) who can turn those conversations and issues into compelling plays and also have the connections to get a chance from the sabhas.
Part of the novelty here is that voices are being dubbed, but for this group, it is also about whose voices are being heard by audiences, and from whose bodies they are perceived to come. So much of this has to do with notions of power, as speaking typically connotes power. In talking about women’s voices in Karnatic music, Amanda Weidman writes that “The dichotomy often drawn between ‘having a voice’ and being silent or silenced, however, leaves us with little way to interpret voices that are highly audible and public yet not agentive in a classic sense, such as voices that have musical instead of referential content or voices that circulate through technologies of sound reproduction” (148). Are the members of the MLDG being silenced? Or are they agentive, since they are the ones scripting and directing the audible and public speech, which is not coming from their voices, but is attached to their bodies and minds. I suggest that in this case, it is possible to be simultaneously silenced and agentive. These plays are written by a woman who has told men exactly what to say and how to say it, so that she can capture their voices in a recording and use them any way she likes, and there is certainly some power inherent in that. This particular case is even more complicated, however, as some of the words are her own, part of this original play script, and some are not. The Vedic chants and songs that thread throughout the play are lifted in their entirety from sacred texts that Bombay Gnanam did not write, although she is using them within her text to serve specific ends involved with telling the stories of these saints in her own way and with her own spin.
Unpacking this new development of recording the soundtrack for a live stage performance has two major components. First, what does it do to the live acting and stage shows to have all the sound pre-recorded? And second, what is the effect of using male voices for an all-women theatre troupe? As a performance strategy, it sounds like it has been very effective in that the sound quality and consistency are excellent and the actors have been able to perform seamlessly with the recording. Natarajan told me that the actresses “don’t find it [lip synching all their dialogues] odd at all . . . It’s a total experience” (Natarajan, 2015b). I have unfortunately not had the opportunity to see either production, however, I wonder what the costs are of this innovation. Without live voices and without any forgiveness on a pre-recorded and paced soundtrack, there isn’t room for improvisation or mistakes, no one can forget her lines, and there is little scope for variation from performance to performance. If an actress sneezes or forgets to enter the stage on cue, the soundtrack will go on as planned. This type of performance involves a different skill than stage actors usually need for success. In my interviews with sabha actors over the years, many of whom also act for television and film, they usually say that their first love is theatre, and they do the mass media work for the money. Part of the reason they prefer theatre is precisely because of the different skill set it requires. They need to learn all their lines and be able to perform them for two hours straight with no second takes, interacting with others who are doing the same thing. They also take pride if they have good voice projection, which is unnecessary if the dialogue will be dubbed in later. These plays, according to Natarajan, are now even being performed by school children, using the same soundtrack as the MLDG actresses. In 2003, Bombay Gnanam mentioned to critic Kausalya Santhanam on that “while some [of her artistes] are born actors, a few just don’t have it in them. So it is quite a job to make them perform” (Santanam, 2003). Being able to concentrate only on body movement and not voice projection or dialogue is one way to make training easier, and the line between film/television acting and stage acting is clearly being blurred in these performances.
Sri Bodendral and Bhaja Govindam overlap with the practice of playback singing on film, where recorded voices are dissociated from the bodies that produce them and associated with other bodies. The transgression in film was often about class and caste, with the female voice (singing a song that was likely written by a man) moving from the respectable body of the singer to the immodest body of the dancer. In Bombay Gnanam’s plays, the transgression is about gender, and the authoritative, respectable male voice is being associated with the respectable, middle-class Brahmin woman’s body— in the transparent guise of a man— though she is transgressive within this community by the very fact that she is acting on a public stage. The place of performance is also likely a factor in the public acceptability of these plays within the Brahmin community, as the large concert halls used by the sabhas for theatrical performances “ensure a respectable distance between the performer and the audience, not only physically but also psychologically” (Weidman, 2006, 138-139). The practice of putting male voices into these actresses’ mouths and bodies plays with voice in the opposite way of Tamil bhakti poetry, which saw male poets writing from the perspective of women. Here, we have teachings that flourished in a patriarchal society and are claimed as their own by men, presented by male voices and expressed through female bodies dressed as (though not disguised as) men. The women wrote the plays using the words and teachings of men, but the actresses on stage have very little autonomy, needing to lip synch the dialogue pre-recorded by men, and their voices are limited to what can be expressed through their words and bodies yet still fit within the constraints of society. In earlier plays, Padmini Natarajan mentioned how the acting could actually change the story; for example, she talked about a villain character that became sympathetic to the audience because of the work of a particular actress. This would be more difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish with a pre-recorded soundtrack.
In some ways, we are seeing the opposite of the situation Weidman observed with the rise of gramophone records and that technology’s effect on women’s performance. Female singers in that era used sound recording as a way to “escape association with their bodies” (Weidman, 2006, 122). Brahmin women, in particular, recorded their voices so that they could “sing for the public without appearing in public and jeopardizing their respectability” (Weidman, 2006, 122). The members of the MLDG appear in public without effacing their female bodies in this way, though the costumes and cross-dressing do provide them with a strategy for detaching their bodies from themselves by attaching them to their characters, which may be male or female. The entire focus of the MLDG seems to be on learning the teachings of these saints and being able to present them simply and effectively for audiences, without audiences being distracted by the traditional proscription against women speaking the Vedas. Technically, because of the recorded male voices, women are not speaking the Vedas, but they are hearing them, learning them, and acting them on stage, which seems a minor distinction, but actually makes all the difference in terms of the discourse that surrounds these plays. The Brahmin community in Chennai is very conservative and most take their Hindu religiosity very seriously. There is less social backlash involved for the MLDG in the criticism of women than in the criticism of men, with all the power they have over these performers, who are nearly entirely dependent on their husbands and in-laws for everything from money and social status to time and even the permission to perform with this ladies drama group. While it may be okay to question social issues and even suggest reforms, it doesn’t follow that it would also be okay to question religious norms. The Tamil Brahmin community has a long history of questioning social mores that comes from its close association with the British during the colonial period. But when Hindu religious traditions were questioned and attacked in Tamilnadu, Brahmins were attacked along with them.5 Religion and the rituals that go along with it are part of Tamil Brahmin identity, and much of that is left to the women to uphold (see Hancock, 1999). There is a very fine line between social conscience and religious practice, and the Tamil Brahmin community in Chennai must negotiate a balance between their modernity, characterized by high levels of education, ties to the West, and social progressiveness and reform tendencies with their tradition, characterized by religion, ritual, and social conservatism within their own families. This successful negotiation is demonstrated beautifully by the women of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group along with their families, friends, and fans.
Conclusion
The developments of the last two years have seen a lot of changes in the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group, which Padmini Natarajan attributes simply to Gnanam’s evolution as an artist and a person. “This is the path that we are trained to follow in our community in our religious, spiritual, social background. You had your family . . . and then the progression is toward the spiritual part . . . Nothing has been planned … It just evolved. In terms of age, in terms of experiences, in terms of her [Gnanam’s] own personal life” (Natarajan, 2015b). What has remained constant, however, is that this drama troupe provides both a space for women to talk about their issues with other women and a creative outlet through which they can act on stage and share their thoughts with other women as well as with men. They have developed strategies over the years that range from limiting the background of the troupe members to educated, affluent Brahmin women and the basic cross-dressing they are known for to criticizing the actions and attitudes of other women, presenting all perspectives to an issue, leaving the plays open and without resolution so that audiences can insert their own values, and now allowing male voices onto the stage. These strategies have gained them acceptance as well as praise from female and male critics alike and have meant that they can address whatever topics they choose, be they controversial or even perceived to be an exclusively male domain, such as the Vedas. The visible support of respected Hindu religious leaders such as Jayendra Sarawati has helped to solidify the acceptance of these women and their theatrical productions amongst the exceedingly conservative Tamil Brahmin community that is their primary audience within the sabha system in Chennai, as well as amongst their family members, on whom they rely in order to continue this work.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Bombay Gnanam for her theatre work and for putting me in touch with Padmini Natarajan, to Divakar Subramanian for putting me in touch with Gnanam in the first place and for speaking with me, to Padmini Natarajan for her willingness to talk and her invaluable insights, and to Arya Madhavan for inviting me to participate in this special issue on women in Indian theatre. Thanks to Amanda Weidman, Pavitra Sundar, Shanti Pillai, and Martha Selby for talking to me about the broader issues at the 2015 Annual South Asia Conference and to Jeremy Wallach, Esther Clinton, Rebecca Kinney, Trinidad Linares, Amira Hassnaoui, and Chris Lezotte for their comments at my International Education Week presentation for Popular Culture at BGSU. Vagish, Eli, and Sivaji have been great, and Stan Rudisill, Shirley and Debbie Casses, and Carolyn Kawecka helped out with the little one so that I could write!
NOTES
1 Sabha Theatre is a genre of Tamil-language theatre in Chennai sponsored by voluntary cultural organizations called sabhas that developed in the early 1950s. I have identified the major traits of the genre as the following: “patronage by sabhas, with their middle-class, usually Brahmin, audience base; a central theme concerning marriage alliances and/or married life; scripted witty dialogue with a thin plot and one-liner jokes, often including language jokes that code-switch between Tamil and English; a socially conservative message; and an ‘amateur aesthetic’ that involves minimal sets, costumes, lighting, and two-hour evening or weekend matinee performances” (Rudisill, 2012).
2 I don’t have exact dates for all the plays. Padmini Natarajan sent me a list with titles and summaries, and dates when she had them, but the inauguration dates are missing for many plays.
3 There are too many to give a comprehensive list, but a few scholars who have addressed this topic include Partha Chatterjee (1993), Mrinhalini Sinha (1996), Sumanta Banerjee (1989), Purnima Mankekar (1999), Mary Hancock (1999), Amanda Weidman (2006), and Davesh Soneji (2011).
4 Bombay Gnanam has acted in more than twenty serials (including Kudumbam, Chellamma, Vaarisu, Kolangal, and Ippadikku Thendral) as well as a few films (including Aahaa, Yai Nee Romba Azhaga Irukey, Nala Damayanthi, Oru Naal Oru Kanavu, and Jigarthanda), mostly as the mother character. She got her start in television serials because of director K. Balachander (for Premi), who started out on the stage, but later moved into working primarily with film and television.
5 There is a large body of literature on the anti-Brahmin movement as well as the Self-Respect Movement in Tamilnadu. A few authors I suggest on this topic include V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Eugene Irschick, Narendra Subramanian, Marguerite Ross Barnett, and Sumathi Ramaswamy.
REFERENCES
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Contributor:
KRISTEN RUDISILL. Is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, USA. She has a Ph.D in Asian Studies from the University of Texas, Austin. Her research focuses on Indian theatre and dance. She has published a number of articles on topics such as sabha theatre, the theatre of Pritham Chakravarthy, and Disney sponsored dance competitions in India. She has translated several plays by Cho Ramasamy, is finishing a book manuscript about the sabha theatre in Chennai, and is currently researching Tamil dance competition reality television shows.
EVOLUTION OF THE
MAHALAKSHMI LADIES DRAMA
GROUP 1989-2015
KRISTEN RUDISILL
Abstract: Bombay Gnanam (Gnanam Balasubramanian) started the all-women Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group (MLDG) in 1989. It hasn’t been easy for the women to take time from family responsibilities, but they make the time because the troupe provides a space for them to talk about their issues with other women as well as a creative outlet through which they can act on stage. The MLDG has made a niche for itself in the male-oriented sabha theatre scene in Chennai, gaining acceptance as well as praise from even respected male Hindu religious leaders. I discuss the story of the MLDG and argue that their own identities as educated, affluent middle-class Brahmin women along with strategic storytelling and staging methods has allowed them to not only avoid censure but to become popular with the conservative, traditional Brahmin community in Chennai while bringing controversial topics to the stage. They have developed strategies over the years that range from basic cross-dressing to criticizing the actions and attitudes of other women, presenting all perspectives to an issue, leaving the plays without resolution so that audiences can insert their own values, and recently allowing male voices onto the stage through recordings.
Keywords: Mahalakshmi Ladies Drma Group (MLDG), lady drama group, female character, male voices, devotional plays, widow remarriage, Brahmin women, Tamil Brahmin community
Introduction
In the 1980s, Gnanam Balasubramanian, or Bombay Gnanam as she is commonly known, read a comment in a newspaper article in which leading Tamil theatre practitioners in Chennai like R. S. Manohar and Komal Swaminathan stated that it was “not possible” for women to write, act, and be fully involved in Tamil theatre. She took it as a challenge and started the all-women Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group (MLDG) in Bombay with a group of her housewife friends in 1989 partly to prove them wrong (Santhanam, 2003). It hasn’t been easy for the women to find the time away from their family responsibilities, but the troupe has done well over the last twenty-six years, bringing mixed gender audiences to performances about women’s issues and drawing attention to women’s struggles as well as to their talents. Gnanam and a number of the other members migrated to Chennai in the mid-1990s and have made a niche for themselves in the very male-oriented sabha theatre scene there.1 Bombay Gnanam is the only playwright and director in the troupe, though she does include input from the others, and they have produced nineteen plays in over four hundred productions. Seventeen of those plays deal with women’s issues and the two most recent are bhakti, or devotional plays. In this article, I discuss the story of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group and argue that their own identities as affluent middle-class Brahmin women along with strategic storytelling and staging methods has allowed them to not only avoid censure, but also to become popular with the conservative, traditional Brahmin community in Chennai (even the men) while bringing to the stage all manner of controversial topics.
Bombay Gnanam and the Sabha Theatre
In some ways, Gnanam has fit in easily to the sabha theatre system in Chennai. Sabhas are voluntary cultural organizations that sponsor performances in the city through the fees of their members. They are best known for their sponsorship of classical music and dance performances, particularly during the December-January Music Festival of Madras. As I explain elsewhere, “Sabha members are generally middle-class Tamil Brahmins, a community that is notorious for its social conservatism as well as for its high levels of education and appreciation of traditional culture” (Rudisill, 2012, 277). They provide the auditorium and bring ready-made audiences to the plays, usually also selling tickets to the public to offset the expense of paying the troupe a fixed fee. It is incredibly difficult to produce a Tamil play in Chennai without their support (although occasionally a university, corporation, or other group will provide funding and a performance space). This means that the sabha organizers have a lot of influence and control over the content and format of plays that are produced in the city. Gnanam grew up in an orthodox Brahmin family near Mayavaram in the Tanjore District of Tamilnadu and has a deep understanding of this community as well as what will be appreciated by them on stage. She knows how far she can push on different issues without offending her viewers and is rarely controversial (partly because she adheres to gender norms both in her personal life and in her plays), even if her themes of choice are.
The plays promoted through the sabhas tend to fall into one of the two categories: comic or serious. Gnanam’s plays are of the “serious” variety, tackling social themes and having a primary goal of opening discussions about sensitive topics and a secondary goal of influencing people’s thinking about them. She often includes some comedy to lighten the mood and entertain, not just educate, viewers, but this is not the main genre of the work. Her plays have addressed such issues as dowry harassment, the problems of working women, suicides, child marriages, widow remarriage, artificial insemination, adoption, surrogacy, mercy killings, the communication gap between husband and wife, immigration, postnatal depression, divorce, homosexuality, and the trend of unmarried couples living together. She says that “Dramas should hold up a mirror to society. Even if a handful of people go home thinking about what they have seen, I have achieved my goal” (Natarajan, 2015a). While the topics may be sensitive, they are issues that people are familiar with, if not from within their own families, then from their communities or the newspapers or television. Sindhu vijayakumar asked Gnanam once, “Hailing from a very orthodox family, what makes [you] take up pro-women issues?” (2008) which is clearly perceived to be quite radical. She responded “My themes have eighty percent truth in them. As I deal with thought-provoking, current and relevant family issues, people are able to identify with it. Besides, I refuse to give in to any pressure to do scenes and deliver dialogues that are not acceptable for my conscience” (vijayakumar, 2008). Since her own conscience is very much in line with the culture in which she was brought up, she rarely pushes anything too far out of the comfort zone of her conservative Brahmin audience.
The characters of sabha plays are usually meant to be everyday people, though, as I state elsewhere, perhaps more exaggerated and flamboyant than their non-fictional counterparts, and there are, of course, exceptions. Female characters in MLDG plays dress just like those in other sabha plays. One of the characteristics of the genre is that “the characters . . . are ordinary folk and they dress in ordinary clothes” (Rudisill, 2012, 286). So the female characters will be in saris, salwar kameez, nighties, or a kurta and jeans while the male characters wear shirt and pants, veshti, or a lungi, and in the MLDG, the performers are very often responsible for supplying and maintaining their own costumes.
Part of the goal of the MLDG plays is, as Gnanam says, to show “reality” and characters that the audiences will recognize and be sympathetic to. In an interview with M. Rajini, she said that
It requires great courage to enact such sensitive themes on the stage. It has to be subtle but the message should be clear; I was walking on eggshells. I was never worried about social acceptance of such plays. My stories only reflected reality. We have a social responsibility to educate our audience. I don’t believe in just tickling the audience with X-rated jokes which are in bad taste. (Rajini, 2015)
There is some contradiction in this statement. On the one hand, Gnanam has to be very careful about what she says, walking on eggshells so as not to draw too much criticism or drive away audiences while still managing to educate them about women’s issues. She admits that “When we staged Ellai Illatha Illaram (“Household Without Boundaries”)2 which was on unmarried couples living together, viewers in the moffusil areas [outside of the city] asked me whether I was trying to corrupt the youth” (Santhanam, 2003). On the other hand, since her plays reflect the reality that audience members can see around them, she isn’t worried about the social acceptance of her work. As I spoke at length with Padmini Natarajan, who was one of the founding members of the MLDG and is still very much involved, although she is no longer on stage, I could see how well this strategy has worked.
Creating Plays
Natarajan explained the process of creating a play. She says that first, Gnanam will read about or hear about some instance and become interested in it. She will sit down with her family, including her husband, sons, and daughters-in-law, to analyze it and see what everyone thinks. Without her husband’s active and visible support, it is unlikely that she would have been accepted and encouraged by the rest of the community as she is, so this is important. After hearing his thoughts, she will bring it to the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group for discussion. The MLDG grew out of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Club, and Natarajan says that there is still something of the social aspect of a ladies club about it:
The rehearsals were great fun always. We let loose. We could talk about anything. Because there was no question of social stigma attached to it or nobody said, ‘How can you think like that?’ And we dealt with very very sensitive issues in all our plays. Sensitive issues in terms of the middle class mentality in a closed society. In terms of, like, you know, gay marriages or surrogacy or adoption, divorce. We’ve handled every subject . . . In this group, through the plays, we have been able to come out with the arguments, the pros and cons of the situation and we have been able to present it to other women. And men. And we also have been able to think about it. To rationalize it, to evolve strategies or evolve arguments for or against. (Natarajan, 2015b)
The troupe provides a space in which women can talk about whatever they want and have fun doing it. They talk about things they read, things they hear, and things that happen to them, and this can all happen within the private and woman-centred space of the home or rehearsal hall, away from “the oppression of family obligations” (Weidman, 2006, 139-140). Natarajan mentioned to me how some of the women have gone through troubles in their personal lives and found answers to their problems in the plays. All viewpoints and experiences are welcome in these discussions, because all together they help Gnanam put together a story that includes multiple perspectives on a topic. Very often, the ending of the plays is left open, with no resolution, which means that no particular point of view is seen as the right answer and privileged. Instead, as Natarajan puts it,
Quite a bit Gnanam leaves it to the audience to decide whether you want to . . . You know, the ending was what you would like it to be. You know? Sometimes it’s a question. She just throws a question. And she says, you decide. You tell me. And very often, after the performance, when the curtain calls are on, people in the audience get up and give an answer . . . We’ve had arguments, we’ve had fights from the audience. How could you do this? You know? It’s been very interesting, the way that the audience gets worked up about this whole issue, whatever the issue is that you have been handling or talking about. (Natarajan, 2015b)
So part of the strategy for staying within the conservative values of the audience, and those of the affluent, educated, middle class families of the performers themselves, was simply to not take sides. The plays thus always align with the values of the audience as if each member can write his/her own ending. For example, in Aarambam (Fresh Beginnings, c. 1998) on widow remarriage, audiences expected that Gnanam would come out in favor of widow remarriage. Instead, she leaves it open. At the end, the widow turns to the audiences and says “Is it necessary for me to marry? Is there no life without marriage, without a partner? What should I do? You tell me what should I do?” (Natarajan, 2015b). There is no sense of what the playwright believes to be the right thing for this character, or for any other woman in her situation.
There is a clear sense of what the “woman’s side” of an issue is versus the “man’s side,” and Gnanam’s quality, of not wanting to take a stand for the woman’s side, as well as the fact that this troupe is all-women in some ways by default— they would not have been permitted by their families to have acted with men— makes me hesitate to call the MLDG “feminist” theatre. The group’s work does, however, share quite a lot with feminist theatres around the world, and of course everyone has his/her own way of being a feminist. Tiina Rosenberg writes that “The truly innovative aspect of feminist performance has been, and still is, the position of subject from which a feminist is able to speak and make statements” (Rosenberg, 2007, 85). The members of the MLDG speak out as subjects to address women’s issues, but they also want to include what they think of as men’s perspectives, and employ cross-dressing to accomplish this. Marjorie Garber talks about how “The appeal of cross-dressing is clearly related to its status as a sign of the constructedness of gender categories” (Garber, 1992, 9). In the context of the MLDG, where everyone knows that the male characters are cross-dressed women, and there is no attempt at actually passing as the opposite gender, this staged construction of gender gives women a space in which they can play with gender stereotypes with impunity while still being protected from accusations of transgression. There has been much scholarship on the way the notion of an ideal Indian womanhood has been connected to middle-class status, Indian nationalism, modernity, and particularly the performing arts of classical music and dance.3 These connections have made it more difficult for women who wish to keep their reputations as good, middle-class women to go against traditional gender roles in their everyday lives. Already these women are somewhat subversive simply because they are acting on stage in a play, but this is mitigated to an extent by the fact that they are acting with women and including what would naturally be considered as the male point of view in the story line. Rosenberg writes that “Performance has been, and remains, a means of politicising and portraying the anger and frustration felt by many feminists. Feminist and queer insights are based on the awareness that something is wrong in the world” (Rosenberg, 2007, 84). The MLDG is pointing out situations and attitudes that are problematic in society, but they are not overtly about politics, anger, or solutions.
The very first play of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group was extremely personal for Bombay Gnanam, as it concerned the issue of dowry harassment, and grew out of her older sister’s experience. Sindhikka Vaitha Streedhanam (The Dowry that Made You Think, 1989) drew on the story of “This sister [who] had never lived with her husband and had been sent back to her parents’ establishment after being ill-treated by her in-laws. Gnanam began to question the system that put a freeze on a young woman’s life and longings because of custom and tradition” (Natarajan, 2015c). This play’s resolution was left open, though the narrative leading up to it was a sad one. The girl was killed by her mother-in-law, who had been shamed by her friends for choosing a bride for her son whose father couldn’t even provide a pair of diamond earrings as a dowry, being a simple clerk. Many years later, the mother-in-law repented her wickedness and offered her son in marriage to that girl’s handicapped sister, who left open to the audience the question of whether or not she should accept the proposal. Natarajan related that after each performance people would talk to Gnanam either in person or on the phone about their and their daughters’ experiences of being victimised by continued demands for money, jewelry, vehicles, or property. Sometimes, distraught parents would call asking for advice and a solution to this problem.
This was the first play Bombay Gnanam wrote, but not the first play she acted in. A few years earlier, she had played the wife of Saint Thyagaraja for the Matunga Dramatic Society where she worked with S. R. Kasturi and learned a lot about direction, sets, and other production aspects that was invaluable when she launched her own drama group. That was her only real preparation for the venture, as she says that “I have absolutely no formal training in acting, direction or playwriting!” (Santhanam, 2003). The name of the troupe comes from the Mahalakshmi Ladies Club, of which Gnanam was a member in Mumbai. She says “I sent an open invitation to those who were interested in acting and we got a huge response” (Vijayan, 2014). She then held auditions where hopefuls read from her script on dowry. She says, “Since it was my first venture, I was a bit scared myself. Will the person fit into this role? Will they cooperate? I believed that it was not enough if they are interested for just one day. There will be times when they have to come for rehearsals three months continuously” (Vijayan, 2014). After selecting the original fifteen members and rehearsing diligently, she publicly staged the play in Bombay, where “it turned out to be a hit” (Santhanam, 2003).
Negotiating Controversial Topics
Gnanam wrote and produced her first eight plays in Mumbai, where popular Chennai comedian S. ve. Shekher saw a show. With his support, the MLDG visited Chennai in 1991 and put on six productions. Gnanam appreciated that Shekher “took efforts to introduce us to Madras audiences” (Santhanam, 2003), and returned to the city to perform in 1994, then she permanently relocated there in 1996. One of the plays they performed in Chennai in 1991 was Gnanam’s second play, Akkarai Pachchai (The Other Side of the River is Green), in which a family found an American bridegroom for their daughter. This play showed “the alienation of the daughter, her inability to see her parents and her final demise far away from her family and people” (Natarajan, 2015c). This was an issue very close to the audience members, as many sabha-goers have relatives that have emigrated to the US for school, work, or marriage. One of the actresses of the MLDG I met in 2003 had two children in the US herself, and clearly had a lot of thoughts on the subject. The fears expressed in the play were very present, especially for those sending their daughters abroad without strong networks for them to join. They worried about their daughters’ happiness and safety, but also about the values of grandchildren raised abroad and the possible loss of tradition. Natarajan recalls that “one gentleman in the audience started a huge argument that was very aggressive. He claimed that we were projecting a false image and that many families had flourished with the migration to greener shores” (Natarajan, 2015d). Clearly the subject touched a lot of people and unearthed some very deep feelings about an issue that many affluent Tamil Brahmin families grapple with.
While topics concerning female health and reproduction are central to several plays, Gnanam’s female characters are not flirtatious or inappropriate (according to Tamil values) in any way. While she may challenge what she sees as problematic traditions or attitudes that oppress women, she is herself quite socially conservative, and this is reflected in her theatrical work. She says that “I too feel that we should not let go tradition in certain issues. My plays are all centred round women, but they do not blindly project the woman’s point of view. Paasathin Parimanam (“The Dynamics of Affection”) was in support of men” (Santhanam, 2003). This play questioned the widely held idea that daughters are more emotionally attached to their parents than sons by focusing on the love of a son for his parents. She also criticizes women in her 2011 play Saswatham (“The Eternal Values”), which “aims to take a sharp critical look at the economically independent, career minded women of today . . . those who consider themselves liberated but whose obsession with being successful and independent makes them highly arrogant” (Santhanam, 2011). Elsewhere, she criticizes young women who “misuse the freedom they have” by not adjusting for the sake of their marriages (Santhanam, 2003) as well as women depicted in reality television and serials that rely on “skimpy dresses, double entendres and villainy” (Vijayakumar, 2008). So although she says “I am bothered about the atrocities against women and girls. I want to work among village people and empower them” (Vijayakumar, 2008) and “I would like to stage plays which would throw light on the domestic problems of rural women and educate them about their rights” (Lalithasai, 2012), she also has a very clear idea about how women should behave in order to earn the respect of both other women and men. The politics of normal female behavior in Tamil society clash in this case with female agency and ideas about modernity.
Women Performing on the Public Stage
While the Tamil stage is more open to women than it was twenty-six years ago, it is still difficult for women of the caste and class of the majority of the MLDG members to perform on stage with men without some risk to their reputation. Gnanam said in 2012 “Three decades ago, it was not easy for women to act in plays. The family members, however, did not mind the women acting with their own gender. This is the reason why my troupe members are only women” (Lalithasai). Things have changed over the years, but not substantially, which is partly why so many women want to be involved with this group, and stay involved for extended periods of time. An article from the UCA News, a Catholic news source in Asia, responded to the 1994 MLDG performances in Chennai that “A ‘woman only’ drama troupe is the latest move by some Bombay women to assert their equality in a male-dominated society. A few decades ago, drama troupes were composed of only men. Even the female characters were represented by men” (Women Stage Plays in Former Male Theatric Domain, 1994). This isn’t true in the case of sabha theatre. The genre started in the early 1950s and many of the earliest troupes, most notably the United Amateur Artists started by Y. Gee. Parthasarathy in 1952, involved female actresses from the very beginning. This is the group with which a young J. Jayalalitha, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, got her start in acting. A few troupes did use all male artistes, though. R. Neelakanthan, who has acted with Cho Ramasamy’s viveka Fine Arts since its founding in 1954, told me that when they started the troupe, some of the boys’ families protested because they did not want their sons to be “spoiled” by working with lady artistes. So they were the only sabha troupe that didn’t have women up through the late 1960s, instead using “the two best-looking men”(very often Cho himself) for the female roles in the plays. Neelakanthan says that this made it difficult for them to get bookings with sabhas that primarily staged plays in North Madras, where actresses were expected. Women acting on stage with men for audiences that included men was an issue even as late as the early 1980s for the especially orthodox. S. ve. Shekher shared an anecdote about a performance at that time, when “Kumudam, a Tamil weekly, wanted us to perform at their campus for their employees. It was on a big condition that no lady should participate in the play. We agreed. We asked one of our boys in the group to do the lady’s role. The play went off very well” (Gopalie, 2002, 220-221). Because of the stigma associated with women acting on stage, it is still a challenge to find actresses for sabha theatre, and plays tend to range between zero and three female characters. Sometimes Cho Ramasamy would play a female character if there were not enough actresses available to stage the play otherwise. There are several actresses who work with a few different sabha troupes, and they command rates that are three times those of the male actors. Other troupes now have family members or friends who will act the female characters, but only for that particular troupe where they are guaranteed the safety of both their bodies and their reputations.
The Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group has continued for twenty-six years as an all-female amateur troupe, with women playing all the male roles in their plays, and this novelty is clearly one of the reasons that audiences are so fascinated by their work. Marjorie Garber talks about how “passing [as a different gender] has both its secret pleasure and its cultural effect” (Garber, 1992, 9). In this case, however, like with the cross-dressing males of Shakespeare’s time, although there is a discussion of the veracity of the performances, there is never a question about passing, because audiences already know that all members of the MLDG are women. There is pleasure as well as humor involved in watching women dressed as and acting like men, which I argue offsets some of the possible controversy of the topics of the plays. Before most reviewers, bloggers, or other artistes talk about the content of the MLDG plays, they remark on the fact that the group is all women, and there is an indulgent and patronizing attitude that this is more interesting than anything the women could actually have to say. This likely gives the troupe a little more leeway to push boundaries on sensitive topics than if the group actually included male actors. Because of the gender of the actors, the MLDG plays are generally the opposite of the normal sabha play, with most of the characters being women. Bombay Gnanam’s 2011 play Saswatham (about surrogacy, abortion, and the need for male heirs) didn’t have any male characters, just referred to them in the dialogue and brought in perspectives generally perceived as male through the voices of women speaking for them. Her more recent devotional plays have nearly all male characters, which has presented new challenges that I will discuss shortly. One of the advantages of an all-female troupe is that it made it much easier to find actresses than if there had also been male members in the group. While there are still six original members, a lot of women have come and gone for various reasons, and to date around two hundred different women “from a newborn baby to a 90 year old lady” (Natarajan, 2015b) have been involved in the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group in some capacity. This is both an amazing resource, with a huge pool of talent to choose from, and a struggle, as it means that there is always someone who needs training. Another issue has been getting people to take them seriously and be willing to sponsor performances. “As a women’s group, Gnanam says they had to face many challenges. ‘We could not approach anyone easily. Initially, there were even a few who asked what a group of ladies can possibly do?’ she says” (vijayan, 2014). They used their club connections to get their start in Mumbai, then popular male theatre artist S. ve. Shekher paved their way in Chennai. Now the reputation and success of Gnanam and the troupe speak for themselves. Gnanam has been honored with a number of prestigious theatre awards over the years, including the Nataka Choodamani award from the Krishna Gana Sabha, Mylapore Academy awards, the Kalamamani award, the vani Kala Sudhakara by vani Mahal, and the Nataka Padmam by Brahma Gana Sabha. Even R. S. Manohar, who had earlier commented that women couldn’t be totally involved in theatre and inspired the start of the MLDG, congratulated her on her work, which she counts among her proudest moments (vijayakumar, 2008).
The main struggle, however, is in the nature of working exclusively with housewives, because it can be difficult for them to control their own schedules enough to commit to make it to all the rehearsals. So this dedication is one of the main criteria for actresses looking to join the group. Gnanam says that “It is tough to consistently produce plays featuring only women. Most of my actors are housewives and there are great demands on their time. In-laws can also be quite hostile to the idea of their appearing on stage and spending so much time away from the family” (Santhanam, 2003). In some cases, their “husbands manage their homes in their wives absence” (Women Stage Plays in Former Male Theatric Domain, 1994), which means that the actresses need a lot of cooperation and flexibility from their husbands and in-laws. On the other hand, “Our members are educated and talented homemakers. This is a creative outlet for talented homemakers” (vijayakumar, 2008). In this sense, it is clearly a pleasure to work with women who are excited for the rare opportunity and prepared to work hard to perform well. Natarajan is still astounded by the loyalty and dedication of the troupe members, saying “I mean, imagine a woman’s organization and we don’t get paid. We don’t get paid a penny. It’s completely voluntary. People come for rehearsal, people spend money, come from great distances, spend time coming for rehearsals” (Natarajan, 2015b). I had the opportunity to see the second ever performance of the 2003 play Nallathor Veenai Seithey (The Beautifully Made Veena), which addresses the issue of divorce and its effects on children. My field notes specifically mention how impressed I was by how well they knew it and how evident the amount of rehearsal time was.
With such a wide variety of women being involved, most of whom having little to no acting training or experience despite possessing some classical music or dance training, which is common for women from the Tamil Brahmin community, there is little consistency, in terms of actors, for Bombay Gnanam to work with. She says, “Also for a lady, doing a male role on stage is not easy. We manage the costume and I teach them the mannerism, but we cannot do anything about the voice” (vijayan, 2014). Seeing women in drag is clearly part of the pleasure audiences take in watching the plays, as much of the conversation amongst the audience afterwards will concern the veracity of their performances. Gnanam used to look for a particular body type for her male roles, saying that “To play the role of a man, one needs to be tall, have broad shoulders and a masculine walk” (Lalithasai, 2012). Three years later, she had changed her mind about the importance of body type, saying earlier this year that “The action will speak for the character; stature does not matter much. I am also open to anyone who has a passion to act. There is no discrimination. I am confident of molding anyone who shows involvement” (Rajini, 2015). The voice, however, remained a problem, becoming more so with the troupe’s first devotional play in 2014.
The Move to Devotional Plays
The last two plays of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Troupe have diverged significantly from their previous work in three major ways. 2014’s Sri Bodendhral and 2015’s Bhaja Govindam both have spiritual themes instead of dealing with women’s issues, involve the dubbing of dialogue, and are not ticketed. Rather than selling tickets for these plays with religious subjects, the troupe presents them for free and solicits donations from viewers. “Gnanam said at the curtain call . . . that though city sabhas funded the first few runs of the shows, people who watch it must do two things— spread the word even using Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp and donate their mite” (Bombay Gnanam’s New Play). The actors stand near the door with boxes in which people can drop their donations. People have been very generous with their donations, and the grand scale of the plays with their expensive custom sets, costumes, and studio recordings has been manageable. The understanding of the importance of technology in advertising is ironic because Gnanam herself does not use any of these platforms; she doesn’t even text message or email regularly.
MLDG’s most recent play, Bhaja Govindam (2015) is “about the teachings of Adi Sankara as conveyed by Sri Chandrasekarendra Saraswati Swamigal” (venkataramanan, 2015). The troupe came up with the idea of Sri Bodendhral, partly thanks to the influence of Gnanam’s husband, as a way to mark their Silver Jubilee (twenty-five year anniversary of their founding in 1989), then were given the directive by Sri Jayendra Sarawati to produce a play about Adi Shankara. Gnanam puts it like this:
We had planned Sri Bodendhral and wanted to get the blessing of the Acharyas of the Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam. But trepidation that the idea might not be received well prevented us from going to Kanchipuram. After mentally making the offering we went ahead with the play. On learning about it through Mutt sources, the Acharyas sent their blessings through a devotee (Venkataramanan, 2015).
After that, the troupe did go to the Mutt, where Sri Jayendra Sarawati gave Bombay Gnanam a book and told her, “Let this be your next subject.” She says that “the title was hidden by the kumkum and when I gently pushed it to the side I realised it was Adi Sankara. We decided to enact the subject on a grand scale, costs notwithstanding. It is a privilege to showcase the life and teachings of one of the greatest Hindu savants” (Venkataramanan, 2015). The new religious plays are receiving a lot of press and attention, all of it positive, and from the reviews both in newspapers and on individuals’ blogs, it seems that the auditoriums are packed with viewers. Sri Bodendhral has been performed well over fifty times to date. The 2015 review of Bhaja Govindam in the Mylapore Times suggests that the subject matter of the play is one with which the audience is already familiar, confirming that the audience mostly consists of members of the conservative Hindu Brahmin community commonly associated with sabhas.
Image 1. Climax scene from Bhaja Govindam. Courtesy of Padmini Natarajan
These recent religious plays are right on trend with what has been happening in the sabhas over the last few years, where there has been a resurgence of religious and historical plays. Often the religious plays involve some humor (such as those staged by United Amateur Artists and Dummies Drama), but the MLDG plays don’t seem to be very funny, with audience members commenting things like “The huge hall [Narada Gana Sabha] was full and had in it, devotees of this saint [Nama Bodendral] who were kept in their reverential mode throughout the event” (Aarvalan, 2014). And (of Bhaja Govindam) “I must say I was transported to a world of piety, prayers, mantras, swamijis, philosophy, so much so, my evening was filled with a meaning and a purpose” (Rajaram, 2015). However, Gnanam has not neglected her roots and still includes a social aspect by weaving in the story of a modern day couple with the past narrative of the saint’s life story. The idea is to take “the deep philosophy of Advaita” (Natarajan, 2015c) and make it easy for ordinary people to understand and thus demonstrate its relevance to those living today.
The most revolutionary aspect of the two religious plays, however, is the pre-recording of dialogue, sound effects, and music. Blogger Aarvalan wrote a review of Bodhendral for Sabhash! in which he states
Another noteworthy element was this – the resorting to the method of a path-breaking synchronization in the delivery of dialogue. The actors never actually uttered a single word while they were on stage. Instead, their miming of words occurred in unison with a taped version that kept running in the background. They matched word for word, perfectly. And this, as Gnanam rightly pointed out, demanded the understanding and commitment of all the performers. And these were a good 45 odd in number. No mean achievement this! (Aarvalan, 2014).
Although he exaggerates the number of actresses (Naveena Vijayan of the Indian Express put the number at thirty), the point is still valid. Gnanam has done a few films and acts regularly on television4 so she is familiar with the processes of playback singing and dubbing from those media. I have heard a number of different reasons for the move to dub the soundtrack for these two plays in particular. When I spoke with Divakar Subramanian at the School for Indian Film Music in Chennai, who has done all the recording and even supplied some of the voices for Gnanam’s recent plays, he mentioned the importance of clarity and consistency, especially with the music in these plays (Subramanian, 2015). However, when I spoke with Padmini Natarajan, I heard a different story: “She [Gnanam] brought in the male voices. Again, kowtowing to the larger good. Because it’s Veda. The Vedas, the religious texts that are being chanted. That are being taught. In both of these plays there is a lot of this. So she did not want the criticism that women are doing this. Women were not supposed to do it, women are not doing it now, and women are fighting to do it. Okay. But she said that the intention of the play is to carry the message of the play.” (Natarajan, 2015b) So even though she acknowledges that women are “fighting” to speak the Vedas in their own voices, Gnanam did not wish to distract audiences from the message of the plays by giving them the opportunity to focus on that debate and her overturning of tradition by allowing the women to do so in her production. To have the women speak the Vedas would be a huge political statement and invite a lot of criticism. The MLDG’s history has been, in part, about pushing norms about both what women can do and what women can talk about, especially in public. They have deliberately tackled controversial topics and that has been a core component of the group’s identity. However, while they have broached these subjects in public, they have circumvented some of the more difficult politics by presenting the hegemonic position and making sure to never completely undermine it. That isn’t possible in this case, where the very presence of a woman’s voice would undermine tradition and make a statement that couldn’t be retracted or even mitigated.
The Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group is right now at a crossroads. Will they choose to follow this more conservative path they are on at the moment, or go back to being controversial and provocative? Today, the MLDG is synonymous with Bombay Gnanam. If she chooses to stay with the religious themes, which seems likely, it wouldn’t surprise me if another amateur women’s theatre group started to pick up where the MLDG left off with addressing social issues. There are clearly a lot of middle-class Brahmin women interested in acting and in talking about the issues that concern them most, and they will be left without a venue if the MLDG discontinues producing plays on women’s issues. It will, however, require someone (or a group of someones) who can turn those conversations and issues into compelling plays and also have the connections to get a chance from the sabhas.
Part of the novelty here is that voices are being dubbed, but for this group, it is also about whose voices are being heard by audiences, and from whose bodies they are perceived to come. So much of this has to do with notions of power, as speaking typically connotes power. In talking about women’s voices in Karnatic music, Amanda Weidman writes that “The dichotomy often drawn between ‘having a voice’ and being silent or silenced, however, leaves us with little way to interpret voices that are highly audible and public yet not agentive in a classic sense, such as voices that have musical instead of referential content or voices that circulate through technologies of sound reproduction” (148). Are the members of the MLDG being silenced? Or are they agentive, since they are the ones scripting and directing the audible and public speech, which is not coming from their voices, but is attached to their bodies and minds. I suggest that in this case, it is possible to be simultaneously silenced and agentive. These plays are written by a woman who has told men exactly what to say and how to say it, so that she can capture their voices in a recording and use them any way she likes, and there is certainly some power inherent in that. This particular case is even more complicated, however, as some of the words are her own, part of this original play script, and some are not. The Vedic chants and songs that thread throughout the play are lifted in their entirety from sacred texts that Bombay Gnanam did not write, although she is using them within her text to serve specific ends involved with telling the stories of these saints in her own way and with her own spin.
Unpacking this new development of recording the soundtrack for a live stage performance has two major components. First, what does it do to the live acting and stage shows to have all the sound pre-recorded? And second, what is the effect of using male voices for an all-women theatre troupe? As a performance strategy, it sounds like it has been very effective in that the sound quality and consistency are excellent and the actors have been able to perform seamlessly with the recording. Natarajan told me that the actresses “don’t find it [lip synching all their dialogues] odd at all . . . It’s a total experience” (Natarajan, 2015b). I have unfortunately not had the opportunity to see either production, however, I wonder what the costs are of this innovation. Without live voices and without any forgiveness on a pre-recorded and paced soundtrack, there isn’t room for improvisation or mistakes, no one can forget her lines, and there is little scope for variation from performance to performance. If an actress sneezes or forgets to enter the stage on cue, the soundtrack will go on as planned. This type of performance involves a different skill than stage actors usually need for success. In my interviews with sabha actors over the years, many of whom also act for television and film, they usually say that their first love is theatre, and they do the mass media work for the money. Part of the reason they prefer theatre is precisely because of the different skill set it requires. They need to learn all their lines and be able to perform them for two hours straight with no second takes, interacting with others who are doing the same thing. They also take pride if they have good voice projection, which is unnecessary if the dialogue will be dubbed in later. These plays, according to Natarajan, are now even being performed by school children, using the same soundtrack as the MLDG actresses. In 2003, Bombay Gnanam mentioned to critic Kausalya Santhanam on that “while some [of her artistes] are born actors, a few just don’t have it in them. So it is quite a job to make them perform” (Santanam, 2003). Being able to concentrate only on body movement and not voice projection or dialogue is one way to make training easier, and the line between film/television acting and stage acting is clearly being blurred in these performances.
Sri Bodendral and Bhaja Govindam overlap with the practice of playback singing on film, where recorded voices are dissociated from the bodies that produce them and associated with other bodies. The transgression in film was often about class and caste, with the female voice (singing a song that was likely written by a man) moving from the respectable body of the singer to the immodest body of the dancer. In Bombay Gnanam’s plays, the transgression is about gender, and the authoritative, respectable male voice is being associated with the respectable, middle-class Brahmin woman’s body— in the transparent guise of a man— though she is transgressive within this community by the very fact that she is acting on a public stage. The place of performance is also likely a factor in the public acceptability of these plays within the Brahmin community, as the large concert halls used by the sabhas for theatrical performances “ensure a respectable distance between the performer and the audience, not only physically but also psychologically” (Weidman, 2006, 138-139). The practice of putting male voices into these actresses’ mouths and bodies plays with voice in the opposite way of Tamil bhakti poetry, which saw male poets writing from the perspective of women. Here, we have teachings that flourished in a patriarchal society and are claimed as their own by men, presented by male voices and expressed through female bodies dressed as (though not disguised as) men. The women wrote the plays using the words and teachings of men, but the actresses on stage have very little autonomy, needing to lip synch the dialogue pre-recorded by men, and their voices are limited to what can be expressed through their words and bodies yet still fit within the constraints of society. In earlier plays, Padmini Natarajan mentioned how the acting could actually change the story; for example, she talked about a villain character that became sympathetic to the audience because of the work of a particular actress. This would be more difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish with a pre-recorded soundtrack.
In some ways, we are seeing the opposite of the situation Weidman observed with the rise of gramophone records and that technology’s effect on women’s performance. Female singers in that era used sound recording as a way to “escape association with their bodies” (Weidman, 2006, 122). Brahmin women, in particular, recorded their voices so that they could “sing for the public without appearing in public and jeopardizing their respectability” (Weidman, 2006, 122). The members of the MLDG appear in public without effacing their female bodies in this way, though the costumes and cross-dressing do provide them with a strategy for detaching their bodies from themselves by attaching them to their characters, which may be male or female. The entire focus of the MLDG seems to be on learning the teachings of these saints and being able to present them simply and effectively for audiences, without audiences being distracted by the traditional proscription against women speaking the Vedas. Technically, because of the recorded male voices, women are not speaking the Vedas, but they are hearing them, learning them, and acting them on stage, which seems a minor distinction, but actually makes all the difference in terms of the discourse that surrounds these plays. The Brahmin community in Chennai is very conservative and most take their Hindu religiosity very seriously. There is less social backlash involved for the MLDG in the criticism of women than in the criticism of men, with all the power they have over these performers, who are nearly entirely dependent on their husbands and in-laws for everything from money and social status to time and even the permission to perform with this ladies drama group. While it may be okay to question social issues and even suggest reforms, it doesn’t follow that it would also be okay to question religious norms. The Tamil Brahmin community has a long history of questioning social mores that comes from its close association with the British during the colonial period. But when Hindu religious traditions were questioned and attacked in Tamilnadu, Brahmins were attacked along with them.5 Religion and the rituals that go along with it are part of Tamil Brahmin identity, and much of that is left to the women to uphold (see Hancock, 1999). There is a very fine line between social conscience and religious practice, and the Tamil Brahmin community in Chennai must negotiate a balance between their modernity, characterized by high levels of education, ties to the West, and social progressiveness and reform tendencies with their tradition, characterized by religion, ritual, and social conservatism within their own families. This successful negotiation is demonstrated beautifully by the women of the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group along with their families, friends, and fans.
Conclusion
The developments of the last two years have seen a lot of changes in the Mahalakshmi Ladies Drama Group, which Padmini Natarajan attributes simply to Gnanam’s evolution as an artist and a person. “This is the path that we are trained to follow in our community in our religious, spiritual, social background. You had your family . . . and then the progression is toward the spiritual part . . . Nothing has been planned … It just evolved. In terms of age, in terms of experiences, in terms of her [Gnanam’s] own personal life” (Natarajan, 2015b). What has remained constant, however, is that this drama troupe provides both a space for women to talk about their issues with other women and a creative outlet through which they can act on stage and share their thoughts with other women as well as with men. They have developed strategies over the years that range from limiting the background of the troupe members to educated, affluent Brahmin women and the basic cross-dressing they are known for to criticizing the actions and attitudes of other women, presenting all perspectives to an issue, leaving the plays open and without resolution so that audiences can insert their own values, and now allowing male voices onto the stage. These strategies have gained them acceptance as well as praise from female and male critics alike and have meant that they can address whatever topics they choose, be they controversial or even perceived to be an exclusively male domain, such as the Vedas. The visible support of respected Hindu religious leaders such as Jayendra Sarawati has helped to solidify the acceptance of these women and their theatrical productions amongst the exceedingly conservative Tamil Brahmin community that is their primary audience within the sabha system in Chennai, as well as amongst their family members, on whom they rely in order to continue this work.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Bombay Gnanam for her theatre work and for putting me in touch with Padmini Natarajan, to Divakar Subramanian for putting me in touch with Gnanam in the first place and for speaking with me, to Padmini Natarajan for her willingness to talk and her invaluable insights, and to Arya Madhavan for inviting me to participate in this special issue on women in Indian theatre. Thanks to Amanda Weidman, Pavitra Sundar, Shanti Pillai, and Martha Selby for talking to me about the broader issues at the 2015 Annual South Asia Conference and to Jeremy Wallach, Esther Clinton, Rebecca Kinney, Trinidad Linares, Amira Hassnaoui, and Chris Lezotte for their comments at my International Education Week presentation for Popular Culture at BGSU. Vagish, Eli, and Sivaji have been great, and Stan Rudisill, Shirley and Debbie Casses, and Carolyn Kawecka helped out with the little one so that I could write!
NOTES
1 Sabha Theatre is a genre of Tamil-language theatre in Chennai sponsored by voluntary cultural organizations called sabhas that developed in the early 1950s. I have identified the major traits of the genre as the following: “patronage by sabhas, with their middle-class, usually Brahmin, audience base; a central theme concerning marriage alliances and/or married life; scripted witty dialogue with a thin plot and one-liner jokes, often including language jokes that code-switch between Tamil and English; a socially conservative message; and an ‘amateur aesthetic’ that involves minimal sets, costumes, lighting, and two-hour evening or weekend matinee performances” (Rudisill, 2012).
2 I don’t have exact dates for all the plays. Padmini Natarajan sent me a list with titles and summaries, and dates when she had them, but the inauguration dates are missing for many plays.
3 There are too many to give a comprehensive list, but a few scholars who have addressed this topic include Partha Chatterjee (1993), Mrinhalini Sinha (1996), Sumanta Banerjee (1989), Purnima Mankekar (1999), Mary Hancock (1999), Amanda Weidman (2006), and Davesh Soneji (2011).
4 Bombay Gnanam has acted in more than twenty serials (including Kudumbam, Chellamma, Vaarisu, Kolangal, and Ippadikku Thendral) as well as a few films (including Aahaa, Yai Nee Romba Azhaga Irukey, Nala Damayanthi, Oru Naal Oru Kanavu, and Jigarthanda), mostly as the mother character. She got her start in television serials because of director K. Balachander (for Premi), who started out on the stage, but later moved into working primarily with film and television.
5 There is a large body of literature on the anti-Brahmin movement as well as the Self-Respect Movement in Tamilnadu. A few authors I suggest on this topic include V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Eugene Irschick, Narendra Subramanian, Marguerite Ross Barnett, and Sumathi Ramaswamy.
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