Nautanki: Desi opera on its death bed
Bollywood is increasingly returning to folk dramas such as the nautanki with its local dances and songs to rake in mass appeal and ensure box-office success, but the traditional theatre form itself is nearing oblivion faced with waning patronage and dwindling state support.
Not many are aware of the fact that when Bipasha Basu and Rakhi Sawant gyrated into the hearts of millions with their ‘item numbers’ in the Hindi flicks ‘Omkara’, and ‘Malamal Weekly’ they were performing in Nautanki style, the once vibrant folk theatre of Uttar Pradesh, now a dying art form.
“Nautanki was once a hugely popular form of entertainment in northern India,” says Deepti Priya Mehrotra, who has researched the drama form.
Performances, which used to go on for five to six days are now completed in an hour. Demand for nautanki has declined substantially and most of them demand performances by the ‘dancing girls,’ says Mehrotra.
Touted to be the desi opera, actors drawn from the working class used elaborate costumes and enacted stories before a local village crowd, who come prepared with mats or dhurries and eatables to view the dramas that were enacted usually in open spaces on makeshift stage.
“Nautanki was full-fledged theatre and not salacious dancing that it is projected to be today,” says Mehrotra.
The plot of the nautanki used to influence Bollywood but over the years the drama form took to borrowing heavily from the screen, says Mehrotra.
Once considered a male domain, the popularity of nautanki catapulted to a new high after the entry of women artistes such as Gulab Bai who was awarded a Padma Shree when she was 70-years old.
“So many things have happened to the folk form. We have to explore it because of the impact of cinema, video and television and cable,” says well-known theatre personality Faizal Alkazi. Now Nautanki as also many other folk forms such as the thumri, thiyam etc are slowly on the verge of disappearing because emphasis is now more on packaging and presentation rather than the exploration of themes and other nuances of the tradition.
A few of the existing artists, says Mehrotra, told her that earlier they donned elaborate and varied costumes for their roles, but today in most places after watching the drama for some time young men in the audience begin to start shouting for dancing girls.
Mehrotra, who has authored ‘Gulab Bai: The Queen of Nautanki theatre,’ says most artistes rue the decline in the nautanki theatre form.
Live nautanki performances are nowadays few and far between, instead recordings are sold on cassettes and shown on film and on television.
Unlike yesteryears performers today do not get the opportunity to interact with their audiences, says Alkazi.
“When Gulab Bai used to enact Laila in the legendary Laila Majnu story or Taramati in Raja Harishchandra she used to interact with the audience, who used to shower her with gifts or donations.”
Alkazi says that kind of interaction has simply vanished, Taking with it a whole lot of patronage for the artistes who are now forced either fend for themselves or look to the government to support them.
Once hugely popular in Uttar Pradesh, particularly Agra and Kanpur, the nautanki is no longer commercially viable and artists, now often live a life of penury in areas like Kanpur’s Rail Bazaar area.
These artists often have to eke out their living by side businesses. Men usually run ‘paan’ shops while women have a better deal as they find work in Mumbai, or are taken to Dubai where they participate in commercial dance performances at weddings, receptions and at hotels or as bar girls, points out Deepa.
Girls hailing from nautanki families are good at dance and with no other option to eke out a livelihood they are at the risk of becoming commodities, says Uma Chakravarty, historian and scholar in women’s studies.
She says the solution lies in not bestowing namesake awards and honours but on giving focused attention to the different communities and classes and their traditional forms of dance song and drama.
— PTI
Leave a Reply