In March 2019, Sydney-based Nautanki Theatre Company invited the world-renowned theatre artist, Danish Husain, to perform live at Riverside Theatre, and to conduct an interactive masterclass at Macquarie University, Sydney. Roanna Gonsalves interviewed Danish Husain, via email, about his chosen artform and his practice as a performer within the broader context of global performance practice.
Would you please tell us a little bit about your journey from Dastangoi to Qissebaazi. What were some of the sparks of inspiration that led you along this path as a performer?
I encountered Dastangoi in 2005. I was part of the troupe of the legendary Habib Tanvir’s play, Agra Bazaar, and was performing at the Virasat Theatre Festival in Dehradun in October, 2005 where Mahmood Farooqui was also performing Dastangoi. My initial response as an audience member was to think, “what a stellar art form that marries literature and performance!”
I had grown up on a staple diet of Marsiyagoi, the art of performing Marsiyas. They are long epic poems commemorating the tragedy of Imam Husain, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. However, Marsiyagoi was more in the tradition of religious theatre performed in a particular milieu, at specific spaces such as at Imam Bargah, or mosques in the context of Muharram. Dastangoi was akin to it, albeit it was prose with a high literary register that can be performed in any space and needed no context or pretext. The secular nature of Dastangoi attracted me to it.
Performing Dastangoi brought me closer to text as an actor. I developed a sense of appreciating literature, poetry, literary criticism, and most of all, the marriage of text, performance, sound, and physicality as an actor. It’s about that profound moment when you embody the text and blur the distinction between the content and the human body performing it.
After a break in my performance of this tradition, for reasons which are very public and I do not wish to dwell on them here, I became possessed with the idea that languages, for the lack of a better word, vernacular languages, especially in India, were suffering. This was happening mainly in major metropolises which suffer from a colonial hangover and very western English-speaking aspirations.
Around the same time I was introduced to the monumental work of Ganesh Devy on the disappearing Indian languages and dialects. His work had a deep effect on me. I decided to stage stories, if possible, from every Indian language both from written and oral literature. But I realised the modern form of Dastangoi, as conceived by Mahmood Farooqui, may not be conducive to stories from other languages. Dastangoi restricts the actor to a sitting position and is mainly an art of dramatic recitation.
I was open to facilitating storytelling even if it meant freeing the actor from a sitting position. I told actors you can bring in any and all skills you possess if you feel that facilitates your storytelling. This included singing, dance, theatrical blocking, musical instrument playing, props, so on and so forth. I was dangerously flirting with the idea of being close to theatre.
It was still storytelling because it was essentially one actor telling the story and not splitting into multiple actors playing characters. But these distinctions are academic nitpickings because essentially every performance is theatre, and every piece of theatre is storytelling. To return to the moot point, I freed the actors from Dastangoi’s sitting posture and dramatic recitation.
The second challenge we had was the language. How do we ensure that the content reaches the audience without compromising the original literature and the performance? For that we divided each story in to two sections: the core language part of the story and the bridge language part of the story. These sections played out intermittently. We kept all the major plot points of the story in the bridge language, mainly English-Urdu-Hindi. We kept the descriptions in the core language, the language in which the story emanated. The performance switched seamlessly between these languages.
Our gamble worked. We found audiences got both the basic story and were able to enjoy the cadence of the original language. And if they understood both the languages, the pleasure was double. With these fundamental departures, I felt the form needed a different name. And I termed it Qissebaazi, which literally means playing with stories. As part of Qissebaazi, I essentially perform Dastangoi and Qissagoi. Other actors bring in dance forms like Mohiniattam, or musical instruments like Tabla, Djembe, Iktara, and so on and so forth.
We have performed stories in Sanskrit, Malayalam, Marathi, and Punjabi to begin with besides Urdu and Hindi. And we have been invited to places as far flung as Harvard University, Columbia University, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Vanderbilt University in the US, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Who / what are some your major influences as a performer? Who inspires you as a performer?
Scores of people have influenced me. Mainly people from traditional theatre, whether religious or folk, eloquent speakers – religious, political, or any field of life, litterateurs, poets performing at mushairas/ kavi sammelan/ soirees/ poetic gatherings, modern actors, stand-ups, mainly anyone and everyone whose words will instantly find a home within me.
As Marsiyagos, I was spellbound by my uncles Izhar Ahmed and Col. Jarrar Ahmed performing Marsiyas by Mir Anees in my native village Nonahara, Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh during Muharram. Later when I grew up I experienced the same effect when I heard majlises, religious discourses during Muharram, by Allama Rasheed Turabi and Maulana Ibne Hasan Nonaharvi.
When it comes to modern actors, I was deeply influenced by Zia Mohyeddin, Naseeruddin Shah, Moin Akhtar, Anwar Maqsood, Manohar Singh, Ratna Pathak Shah, Seema Pahwa, Daniel Day Lewis, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Saurabh Shukla, Irrfan Khan, and Manoj Bajpayee, to name a few, for their facility with words.
Then there were scholars like Shamim Hanafi, Gopi Chand Narang, Shamsur Rehman Faruqi, Kaushik Basu, Andre Betteile, JPS Uberoi, P. Sainath, Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi, Habib Tanvir, Javed Akhtar, Jonathan Gil Harris. Also, poets like Zehra Nigah, Afzal Ahmed Syed, Ranjit Hoskote, Rahat Indori, journalists like Ravish Kumar, and politicians like Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechuri. All these people have a facility with words where their words strike deep within when heard. They come from a place of great wisdom and conviction. Weathered words. I am mainly referring people whom I have experienced personally.
What has the reception to Qissebaazi been in India?
Qissebaazi is just two years old and at a very nascent stage. So, far I have not taken any help, financial or otherwise, from anyone to develop this form. The actors too are busy with their other ambitions and the business of living so it often becomes an exercise in managing everyone’s time, aspirations, priorities.
Whenever we have performed we have received great applause and encouragement. But it is a long haul before it becomes a movement of sorts. I am also on a learning curve. I am constantly tweaking the design, the look, and figuring out ways of popularising the art form. Often I am strapped for resources but I guess in due time things will come around.
Would you please tell us about your experiences as a performer in Australia. Is there anything that stood out for you as you performed for audiences here?
I was invited first to Australia last year, 2018, by Urdu International, an organisation helmed by poet-novelist-journalist-scholar Ashraf Shad Saheb. I was relatively unknown in Australia but he placed his trust in me by making Qissebaazi the show stopping event at his literary festival in Sydney last year.
I knew that most audience members will be Urdu literature lovers so my task will be easy. And true to my expectation, it was a fantastic take off. Shad Saheb left no stone unturned to ensure the success of the event. I received unmitigated love and affection. Present in the same audience were Neel Banerjee and Reema Gillani of Nautanki Theatre. They immediately took to the art form and decided that it has to come back to Sydney. And thus began the process of re-inviting Qissebaazi to Sydney.
The second performance also received a great reception from the Sydney crowd. I guess I have developed a bond with the Australian Urdu-Hindi community, and hopefully will have more opportunities to present not only in other Australian cities but someday introduce Qissebaazi to mainstream theatre goers too in Australia.
What was your experience like conducting the workshop with Nautanki Theatre Company?
Indeed Nautanki Theatre worked hard to pull off the workshop but the man who was catalyst in its success was Dr. Iqbal Barakat of Macquarie University who gave his unflinching support and passion. The sign up was larger than I expected. Some thirty odd people turned up who sat in rapt attention for an hour and asked the most interesting and thought provoking questions.
We love when we are made to push our boundaries, whether performatively or conceptually, and the workshop achieved that. Dr. Barakat took a very productive, exhaustive interview of mine and I am looking forward to the results of the same. Thanks to Neel, Reema, their team, and Iqbal for the same.
Your work is very much grounded in a particular storytelling tradition yet it is open and porous in the way it that absorbs contemporary cultures and connects with contemporary audiences in different parts of the world. In this way your work may be seen as working across cultures and time periods. What are some of the challenges and joys you experience when doing such work?
I think the basic template of storytelling is universal. It works from a station of empathy, a desire to share, and to bind stories with the unsaid, unbound wisdom of collective human existence and experience, to offer an alternative repository of human wisdom and minuscule stay on this planet.
However, in different cultures, different things get accentuated. A more carnivalesque, or a natural setting, like with Aboriginal communities, will result in greater physicality in storytelling. One needs to stand out physically in the rich environment where one stands and performs. A more baithak kind of storytelling may be subdued but would deploy richness in language and oral tonality. Cutting across this is a more integrated world and modern audience. My function as a storyteller is not just to present a quaint story to my audiences but to pull strings that instantaneously connect the meta temporal and spatial natures of our existence.
Intersectionality is something that is unexplored as of yet. Stories work in a milieu, in a historical context that is living and all pervasive, like with the Ramayana or Marsiyagoi. When stories are performed out of their context, their effect could be reductive, and one may not comprehend the full force of the tradition. It is only after audiences get familiar repeatedly with different cultures and traditions, and are able to appreciate them in their original context that we can begin to think of intersectionality. I think the internet and technology can play a great part in that.
My joy is primarily in becoming the story when performing it. Like a conduit, an aperture, I am just the medium through which the audience experiences the story.
What advice would you give to young people considering a career in theatre?
Who am I to give advice to anyone? Buddha came long before me and he is still unheeded. So, I dare not give any advice. It’s a journey, a long haul, jump on and find your own meaning.
Also read:
Theatre & Politics: Danish Husain in conversation with Souradeep Roy, Indian Writers Forum.
Danish Husain on TedX