Giriraj: Your creative talent, given the popular difference between the creative and the critical, has found expression in lyrical and dramatic forms, which according to Aristotle are types of poetry or poesy. This could be my preface to our dialogue on your plays and as well as an indicator to see it as an abiding principle or integrity as Malayaj would have called it.

Nand Kishore Acharya: The flash of a moment of experience, its recognition and the delineation around it form a lyric. Similarly, recognition of a dramatic moment and a situation and a few characters surrounding it create a play. This dramatic moment is a flash in the same manner and it is not ‘imitation’ as Plato calls it. I feel this flash is very much alike in lyric and drama. If I recall my moments of writing the plays, in each of them there is a flash of this kind. Drama occurs out of that. So the recognition of such a sensitivity-prone moment is equally important in both. And as far as creative sensibility is concerned, some connecting thread can be found there.

Giriraj: Though it is perhaps an improper and invalid interrogation in case of a creative writer – why did your poetic talent not incline towards the epic?

Nand Kishore Acharya: I don’t know. But if it has happened like this, then that is the way it is. In any case, in an epic envisioning a full circle of time is more significant than identifying a moment. Perhaps it is not possible to write an epic in free verse. Plays can be epical but it is just not my nature. This is why my plays are focused, as if many things get focused on one. It is not so in an epic. It may have its own relevance but I never felt inclined towards it.

Giriraj: There are some themes that recur in your plays like the problematics of the relationship between the individual and power and the desire for power and the consequent fear and insecurity. The problem of Ghulam Badshah’s Balban is the internal fear of a man in power. In Paagalghar, there is a more extended fear on a different plane. These and a few others are such recurrent themes which may have spontaneity of their own but then you might be viewing them as they take a dramatic form.

Nand Kishore Acharya: Yes. It is acceptable that when you identify a lyrical or a dramatic moment, there are few things that look to direct this identification towards certain other things. And the sort of connecting thread we are looking for finds some form here. It is the sense or experience of human freedom that connects my writings. In poetry you see an encounter with a power or superpower like god. In plays it is so with some other forms of power. Hence freedom is a big value for me that emerges out of the creative process because creativity is the proof of freedom. Only by realizing your creativity or by living through the experience of creating, you experience real freedom. Therefore it is possible that plots which have a feeling for and an insistence on freedom get woven. You can see this in Hastinapur as well.

Giriraj: You’ve maintained that a drisyalekh offers particular possibilities for acting. Do you consciously seek to create them in your script? By calling it a drisyalekh we expect scenes and there aren’t many of them in your plays.

Nand Kishore Acharya: I believe that acting is the basis of both – the play and its performance, and of the things that make a play a spectacle, acting is the most significant. There are many forms of acting: Aangik, Vacik, Aaharya, Satvik. Ultimately it is the satvik. The rest only collaborate to let the satvik rise above them. So when we stress that a play is a drisyalekh and that my plays have lesser spectacles than other playwrights’, we should recognize that others have a greater emphasis on other (than satvik) forms of acting as well, especially on aaharya. Props, blocking, costumes are all parts of the aaharya. To me both aangik and aaharya come after satvik and my point of focus is this satvik because the other two are a director’s decision. They are really the director’s, and this is why different directors can do the same play in different aaharya and aangik medium but not in different satvik and vacik unless they change the playwright’s language or the experience involved and, hence, the structure of the play. Otherwise it is not possible. To make it closer to her perception a director would make changes in aaharya or aangik. She would select some gestures or some particular set design or would make changes in light and audio to develop something different. As a playwright, I feel it’s her job and why should I intrude on her space? I am better off doing my best in my own field.

Giriraj: Besides these forms of acting, two theories of acting are widely accepted. My reading of your plays has led me to think that every play demands the form of its enactment precisely by the way it is constructed. It has scope for alienation and also for an absolute dissolution of the self on the actor’s part.

Nand Kishore Acharya: In fact I find both theories insufficient. I don’t agree completely with either of them. Acting is a kind of Yoga. Yoga includes alienation and dissolution both. Take Kisi Aur ka Sapna for that matter. It is written with Sakshi Bhava. An actor witnesses herself playing someone else. What is the pleasure of an actor? Or what does she achieve? If we leave fame and other worldly things, what does she get in return? I think to see yourself act is a feeling that leads to a deeper realization of self-consciousness. The actor comes to know how she is a receiver-consciousness and a seer-consciousness at once. There is a sloka in an Upanisad about two birds sitting on a branch. One bird eats and the other only watches. This is the truth for every art and for literature it has been quoted frequently in Indian tradition. But it is true of any art form. What is a dancer’s experience? Is she not a witness to what she performs? Even the state we call ‘absorbed in the dance’, is it not regulated by grammar? If, still, she reaches identification and oneness, who is the one experiencing this oneness? Who is watching, witnessing when she is already absorbed and drowned? Acting is exactly the same experience. To me it is the sakshi bhava. So alienation and the other theory of self-dissolution, of transformation, of otherness or of oneness meet in the sakshi bhava.

Giriraj: The same question can though be asked from the spectator’s position. Given that acting is exploring the sakshi bhava, if we consider ‘spectating’ along with acting and seek to place it by Sadharanikaran…

Nand Kishore Acharya: A spectator is indeed a witness. She does not only witness but experiences an event happening before her, but is all the time aware of being an observer. Auditing is also a creative act. Like a reader, a spectator has her own creativity and if we believe that everything is a text and the meaning is as dependent on the reader as it is on the text itself, can we claim it without acknowledging the sakshi bhava? Is it possible without exploring the sakshi bhava? I mean the reader’s creativity, the spectator’s creativity, the creativity of those who extract meaning out of a text – all these creativities are various forms of the sakshi bhava. The sakshi bhava the actor experiences while acting, should be experienced by the reader while reading, by the spectator while viewing and by the audience while listening.

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Giriraj: Though your stand is very clear on this, yet the expectation of contemporary relevance imposed upon a historical play, which sometimes is also an author’s declared purpose, as in the case of Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq – does it deprive the text of any self-sufficient significance?

Nand Kishore Acharya: No. Two things need to be considered. One, the position from where we are looking at history. We cannot view it from a point in actual time of the events, about that we can only speculate somewhat. The second way is to view from where we are today and it will, in itself, be a ‘contemporary interpretation’. I’d like to remind you that history again is a text, and standing at his point of view the playwright is trying to extract meaning(s) out of it. So the point of view is decisive. Besides this there cannot be any direct relevance. About Karnad’s Tughlaq, it was said that he was a visionary like Nehru and, at that time, Nehru was considered to be the hero or the Prime Minister that failed. So the reasons for his failure and his dilemma were imposed upon Tughlaq. It is in fact a reductive relevance, it reduces the play, or at least the central character, into an allegory. So you see this kind of relevance. But the game of power and its institutions that we see in our time show that only the superstructure has changed, the base, the game is still the same. If the microstructures are unchanged and a playwright is able to discover and show this, then to see contemporaneity in the text is not invalid. If you are able to identify this game of power in history, the play automatically becomes contemporary. And if you can’t do this, then what else are you doing? I mean, when you choose history as your source you take the power discourse of the time along, the only difference being the structure. At that time it was a feudal structure and now a democratic structure. You identify the common, the interrupted game of power, and in this identification lies your contemporaneity, and it is not something to be acquired separately.

Giriraj: There’s some kind of fascination or attraction or inclination or a liberal attitude towards what is called ‘insanity’ or ‘abnormality’ in the modern literature. In brief, the abnormal is a medium to see the normal, it’s a lens through which the normal is viewed and commented upon in these literatures. In Paagalghar too, the abnormal is used to comment upon the normal. But since you will refuse to submit it to such an obvious design and will also deny any such conspiracy in the plot, I leave designs aside and look for the experience and, for me, that dramatic moment in Paagalghar lies in one sentence: “Everyone is a horse and everyone a rider.” The play is a perpetual and serialized reversal of roles between the two, constructing a discourse of power in a different manner.

Nand Kishore Acharya: Yes. There is a horse and a rider inside everyone. Everyone wants to be in power and at the same time everyone is terrified by it and governed as well, it is the experience of being horse and rider simultaneously. It is a mental conflict and there are two ways to see it. One, the system is such that one is a horse and another a rider, something that is too obvious to need any explanation. Second, the rider, or the desire to be a rider inside a person hides within it the fear of being a horse. One who desires to get power is the most terrified one, afraid of the power itself. The part of human psyche inclined towards power is the rider, and the part afraid of it is the horse. Anyone who desires to be a ruler or a leader or a Balban is a slave somewhere deep inside. The desire to rule is proof of being a slave. So the conflict between the slave and the ruler in Ghulam Badshah is the one between the horse and the rider. And I don’t disagree with what you say, only that we have different ways of saying it.

Giriraj:. There’s one more thing that connects your plays. The insane lives on the margin of our life. Vidur’s mother in Hastinapur is not even on the margin, she is in the background, in the wings (though she is the central character in the play) and why Vidur himself cannot be an heir is the grand question giving voice to those whose historical destiny in our society is to be marginalized forever. And women’s position in our society! It goes without saying. Is this visible connecting link a proof that in drama there’s more space to conceptualize, to make projections, even with you?

Nand Kishore Acharya: One can see more of those flashes of a lyrical or dramatic moment in the suppressed, the ignored, the oppressed, the insulted ones. Because there is agony, anxiety, struggle and inner conflict. They are taken to be negligible and lifeless. It is so with the ignored characters in history, and it is so with women and Dalits. It is only natural that a writer’s sensibility gets inclined towards those who are deprived of freedom and human grace. You need not be influenced by any ideology or philosophy or political party for doing that. It is a natural human process and, because art is originally related to human emotions, it is obvious too. But it happens in poetry also, though in a different manner. In poetry also you see something cornered, isolated from the central emotion or a situation recurs. You can see this in Bansuri: Mor Pankh and Upakaran and also in a poem about dance in which a bead is cornered. The poem asks, what is the trauma of that cornered bead? You can call it subaltern. In poetry, not just the marginalized people get a voice, but also the emotions which are sidelined and ignored. If you want to call it a connecting link, it is, but it connects not just my plays but my whole writing. And, as I said, the stress is on human independence.

Giriraj: In Kimidam there is a ruin, physically present. Hastinapur the city is a ruin past a Dharmyuddha and in spite of the restoration of the faith… great domestic violence has taken place… and unless this world is a vast ruin, it can’t be a great Paagalghar. Your poetry also has a ruin. I’ve been constantly trying to place your poetry and drama side by side and perhaps, this time, we can establish the integrity I proposed at the beginning. The ruin in your plays is like the ruin in your poetry, but with a crucial difference. In the plays, the ruin has a predestined existential position. It is not a space with continuous creative possibilities as it is in poetry. It seems to have the same structure, the same design, but a different predestined existential condition at which it has arrived.

Nand Kishore Acharya: Then we can conclude that I am writing an epic, though not in the conventional structure. And if not conventional, is it a postmodern fusion?

Giriraj: Yes, but why there is this change in attitude? Is it only the demand or the condition of a form?

Nand Kishore Acharya: It is not a change in attitude as such. It is the kind of experience you have while reading the play or afterwards. If you feel the entire world converting into a ruin or a grand asylum, you are viewing the phenomena at its extreme or after its completion. If you placed both ruins face to face, you’d probably feel they complimentarily complete one presence – the ruin.