by Keval Arora
Every time a play comes over to Delhi from, say, Bombay, we fall into moaning about the lack of professionalism on the Delhi stage. Productions from elsewhere tend to look slick, on the ball, and cool, regardless of whether these are light comedies or weightier texts. In contrast, the capital’s theatre, with some exceptions, often seems like a little kid in shorts trying to run with the big boys. One reason for this gap in standards could be that much of that city’s theatre – be it in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi or English – is in the hands of those who do it full-time. Actors, directors and technicians who make a living of this can be expected to deliver time and time again, which is more than can be said of the floating, part-time community that keeps most of Delhi’s theatre ticking over.
Admittedly, this is an age of professionals and specialists. Even super specialists, if you will. Persons who invest great time and effort in studying and mastering their areas of expertise. This is no time for the dabbler and the amateur. For instance, take a look at the idea of worth as enshrined in the media. We are fed with innumerable accounts of a lifetime’s training and concentrated passion, all duly rewarded by the pot that beckons from the end of the rainbow. Part-time loves or temporary interests are rarely celebrated, and then too only when there is a ‘human interest’ spin to the story.
Why should our stories of worth invariably be stories of dedication and expertise? Delving deeper and deeper into narrower areas of interest is perhaps natural to some professions – for instance, medicine, law and so on – because the method of exclusive perusal is intrinsic to the nature of the services they offer. But, when a similar perspective shapes the general opinion of the urban educated towards all things trite and dutiful, then one is no longer sure of its value.
We have, over the years, grown into the habit of expressing appreciation by narrating the number of the years and the quality of single-minded zeal spent in the pursuit of goals. It’s a rule that everyone has followed, praisers and players alike. When, for instance, was the last time you heard someone acknowledge praise with saying how things comes effortlessly to them? Most of us would frown upon such confessions as rude and disparaging if not downright immodest. Privately, we’ve all experienced the huge role that chance and luck have played in our fine achievements. Or, the fact that sometimes things have just fallen into place without any perceptible ‘extra’ on our part. But, in public, we tend to join the herd in assuming that credit is due only when there has been conscious intention and conscientious effort.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing odd about single-minded devotion. After all, where would our classical traditions be were we all to look at such absorption as monomania? My quarrel is not with those who devote a lifetime to perfecting their passion. My quarrel is with lesser mortals like you and me who imagine that this is the only way to be, or that nothing of value can be achieved without a surrender of other interests and cares to the one grand passion.
Whatever happened to the amateur? Hey, what’s wrong with having a casual interest in things? Our cultural pre-disposition to believe that we need to excel at what we do has done more harm than good in the nurturing of curiosity and interest. Or, in the moulding of balanced children, with their heads screwed on right. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the hordes of bustling parents hustling their kids through a course here and a workshop there, in the touchingly misguided conviction that something is worth doing only when we do it well. And, that we do something well mainly when we are trained for it. As a result, we put so much pressure on young children that they either rebel by dismissing all guided activity as a chore or acquiesce by succumbing to a mindset that defines itself through constantly pitting itself in competition against something else.
Yes, you do act better when you are taught the techniques. Or, ride a horse better when someone shows you the ropes. But, unless you want to make acting or horse riding your bread and butter option, you’re better off when left alone to discover the pleasures that these activities can give. And, pleasure rather than excellence is made your primary goal. It does not matter if someone else is ‘better’ at it than you are. What matters is your quality of engagement with your action. That’s when you become an amateur in the original sense of the word: one who does something for the love of it rather than as a means of becoming the king-rat in some rat race. If, in the process, you run the risk of embodying the more common understanding of the word (‘amateur’ in the sense of lacking in experience and competence), then so be it.
The word ‘professional’ is perhaps the villain of the piece, for it has painted the amateur into the corner of incompetence. A professional is not necessarily better than the amateur. Technically speaking, all that separates him from the amateur is that he depends on his craft for providing him an income, while the amateur’s relation to his craft is not a pecuniary one. Remember when our sportsmen turned ‘professional’? Overnight, they began to get paid for showing the same application, or lack of it, on the field. (Today of course, cricketers have demonstrated that they are professional at more things than we dreamed were in their philosophy.)
Sure, the professional usually spends more time on his craft than does the amateur who often also has other things to do. To that extent, the best amongst the professionals tend to be technically more sound, more disciplined, and more organised in approaching work as compared to amateurs. This obviously has its advantages, but there is a negative side to it as well. The professional tends to fall away over a period of time, scoring in precision rather than passion, and dependability rather than ability. When the amateur gets bored, he quits. When the professional gets bored, he falls back on mimicking the things that he once used to do well; in other words, he falls back on technique. In this sense, the amateur’s raw freshness remains an attractive option to the cooked competence of the professional. To return to cricket: there are more cricketers that are professional in England than in any other country, but it is a moot question whether England has a cricket team at all.
I am reminded of a comment that Ebrahim Alkazi, who did so much to establish a professional integrity in our theatre, once made to students of his school, the Living Theatre. For all his commitment to the stage and his passion for performance, Alkazi recommended that his students not enter full-time into the theatre. He argued, paradoxically, that only those with separate sources of income can do justice to their passion for the art. Those who depend on theatre for a living will find themselves compromised at several steps, consenting to accept assignments they never would have looked at otherwise. Professional actors may well bear the marks of success, but it is the amateurs who more often than not keep the flag flying high.
If Delhi’s theatre was at its vibrant best in the seventies, it is particularly because of the quality of its amateur members. Most groups were so populated with young students that these sometimes appeared no different from student theatre groups. And these groups had all the vivacity of a youth theatre. It showed in the kind of scripts chosen, the styles adopted and the general air of adventurism that characterised their projects. Members worked without payment, and they worked hard. Nobody made any money. (If, hallelujah, a production did not end up in the red, the surplus was usually kept aside as seed money for the next.) That helped keep costs down to some extent. Rather, it kept costs down enough for one to look upon these members and their labour of love as the true sponsors of this theatre. The groups were not always politically inclined, but they did not do plays with an eye to the box-office or social acceptability. The media was not then ever waiting, ready to devour or deify. Professional theatre did not then exist, except in some government-supported repertories: the NSD Repertory, the short-lived Puppet Theatre Repertory run by the Shri Ram Centre, and Shiela Bhatia’s group, to name a few. One sign of the absence of the professional actor was that there were few older actors around; the roles of elderly people were invariably played by recognisably young people.
That has all gone. The profile of today’s theatre audience seems to have generally widened even as in actual numbers it may well have shrunk. Plays now have large budgets and groups are therefore less inclined to be bold in their choice of scripts. Things have become more ‘professional’ – expecting to be paid something at least is not an inconceivable or obscene idea – but they have also become more sedate. Students do still come into the theatre, but they now tend to come armed with a curriculum vita waiting to be filled. The amateur is now no longer a state of mind. It is merely a temporary state in the great chain of transformation from the novice to the professional.
An earlier version of this article was first published in
