She’s been introduced as an actress par excellence, an award-winning director and an activist. But when you speak to Nandita Das, you realise she’s much, much more than that. The actress, who’s been part of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival and acted in some hard-hitting, social issue films such as 1947, Earth and Fire, is taking another “first step” into a new world: that of the theatre.
“Between The Lines marks many firsts,” says the 2008 recipient of the Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. “First time I’ve written a play, first time I’m doing theatre, first time my husband is acting on stage and producing a play. I’m not a big theatre watcher and don’t know a lot about it. But I think the desire to do this play was less as a playwright or director and more sharing what I feel about how women juggle [multiple things] in their lives and the kind of conditioning men and women have [undergone].”
The play, to be staged on Friday and Saturday in Dubai, is the story of Shekhar and Maya, an affluent lawyer couple who come face to face in court when Maya decides to take up a case against her high-profile criminal lawyer husband, after years of putting her career on the back burner drafting contracts for a law firm so she can take care of her home and family.
“Even in our affluent society, educated couples too negotiate through their relationship to achieve the perfect balance. These issues and aspects of human relationships is what interested me. In fact, everywhere we’ve taken it, people have only said ‘My God, that’s our story, how did you know?’ Well our stories aren’t so different. It’s my story, your story and our story. We even had a few CinePlay screenings at Yale where I was doing a fellowship for four months and at the Museum of Moving Images [in the US} and it’s amazing how it transcends boundaries.”
CinePlay, a cinematic-style representation of theatre, is a new concept that Das and her husband Subodh Maskara (who plays Shekhar in the play) have introduced in India.
“Cinema’s bigger advantage is it reaches a larger number of people. What CinePlay is trying to do is not cut the live show or be an alternative. Not everyone has the accessibility to a live show, either because the play is not showing near them or they do not have the funds to see it. CinePlay increases accessibility,” Das explained. “There are many plays that I’ve actually wanted to watch but couldn’t. Most other art forms are being archived in some form or the other so I think CinePlay will prove to be a big advantage. Also, it’s a great means of education. Tomorrow if you wish to teach theatre in a small town or outside your country you can use the material. Subodh always gives this example of watching cricket in the stadium, the excitement and the thrill of it all. But now most of us watch it on TV because it has other advantages, such as you get to watch it from angles you will never get to see in a stadium. Similarly, CinePlay combines the medium of cinema to capture nuances you may not be able to see in a live show. So it has different advantages and disadvantages.”
Though known worldwide for her roles in Deepa Mehta’s first two films of the Earth, Fire, Water trilogy, Das has had award-winning roles in regional cinema, too, but agrees it gets shortchanged in the international arena when reference to Indian cinema is made.
“That’s everywhere right? Hollywood has killed a lot of European cinema because its bigger mass appeal overshadows allows it much more bandwidth to do the marketing and make its presence felt. Same with Bollywood and regional cinema. Yes, regional cinema is seen as secondary. So many of my own friends would say ‘Oh, why would you do these regional films, who watches them?’ As if people only exist in Delhi and Mumbai. There are people everywhere and those stories are also important [and need] to be told. So I feel it’s better to refer to it as Indian cinema, which is far more encompassing, instead of just Bollywood.”
A Master’s Degree graduate in social work from Delhi University, issues such as gender inequality and women’s empowerment are on the forefront for the actress but she feels India is not the only country that suffers from such problems.
“Gender inequality is a worldwide phenomenon. In some patriarchal, traditional societies it’s a little more than others. I know [because of all the news] we see India as a ‘rape country’ but it’s actually ranked 128th in the world — which is not to justify it at all because what’s happening is not just extremely shameful but tragic. Rape is sexual abuse and almost every woman has been impacted by some form of abuse, whether in her childhood or her growing up years and such violation deeply scars a woman. This is definitely an important issue but various forms of inequality have been happening right from the point the child is born — female foeticide, infanticide, dowry and domestic violence. And this is across class, not just in the economically backward or the uneducated,” said Das, who has a four-year-old son. “Empowerment is a process of continuity, not something you can speak of in the past tense. It’s a journey, sometimes a slow process. We all struggle — I struggle even with issues I may be aware of. For instance, feeling guilty. Women are prone to feel guilty. They are trying to do their best but somehow society makes them feel guilty, they make themselves feel guilty. But I’m an optimist and, yes, things are changing. Most importantly, women are speaking up much more”.
In 2013, Das gave voice to the Dark Is Beautiful campaign in India, which she says she didn’t feel was as important a prejudice because she was never made to feel a complex regarding her own skin colour by her family.
“I was shocked how viral [the campaign] went because it touched such a raw nerve. We had people writing in and commenting from all over the country. I mean, you ask any African-origin student and you’d be horrified by the stories they will tell you. And within a country like ours, which is large and varied where we have different coloured skin people in every region, [it’s] not just Kashmir to Kerala thing. Within a region we have darker-skinned and lighter-skinned people and we definitely make people with darker skin — women more so — feel they are worthless. That’s why they grow up with such low self-esteem. It’s weird because in a country that’s 90 per cent dark skinned, we’ve managed to create that prejudice against dark skin and these products are just cashing in on that. It’s distressing. That’s why I supported the campaign. In fact I used to speak more against violence against women and didn’t realise this issue could be just as important, maybe because my parents didn’t put a complex in me.
“It’s just one should be comfortable in one’s skin — literally and metaphorically. Whatever identities you are born with — why should I be ashamed or proud to be a woman? Why should I be ashamed or proud to be a Hindu? — are all given. I want to be defined by who I am as a person. How do I respond to situations, what are my talents, how do I further my interests, what kind of human being I am, what are the sensitivities I have? I mean it’s important, but I have ten more important things to do so why would I focus my time, money and energy to just look good?
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“I’m already working on it. I’d been thinking of it for a long time and researching on for a long time. It’s a film on the writer Saadat Hassan Manto. He wrote a lot about partition, women, and freedom of expression. I feel so many things he wrote about are so relevant today. I’m quite excited about it as it’ll be shot in Mumbai and Lahore. And yes, I’m looking for producers, if anyone is interested (laughs).” — Nadita Das on her dream project.
