Pritham K Chakravarthy is an independent researcher, playwright, director, performer, film critic and activist based in Chennai. Her recent performances include Meendum Meendum, Surya Mukam and her own solo piece Nirvanam that evolved after six months of research and recorded interviews with members of the hijra community. This production has toured India, the USA under a Fulbright Fellowship and the 2002 Edinburgh International Festival. Pritham Chakravarthy appeared in Mirror, at Pragirthi Foundation, a solo one-woman narrative written by Venkatesh Chakravarthy (2003), Vellavi, at The Other Festival (2003), and has taken part in many other Tamil productions over the past 25 years. She has also worked on Orientations, a theatre production by Border Crossings, which opened in London in October 2003, and toured the UK and India in 2004-05.
Her research experience includes being a research associate at various universities working on a variety of subjects – ‘Reproductive Rights in early 20th Century’ (Warwick University), ‘Politics of Temple Entry’ (Barnard College, Columbia University) and ‘Continuing Unity - Nation and State’ (University of Toronto).
Her publications include ‘Innum Ethanai Kaalam Thaan’, a critical analysis of the growth of Tamil cinema co-authored with Venkatesh Chakravarthy for Nakeeran; ‘Ippadiyaga’, a critical article on the stardom of Tamil film star Rajnikanth in India Today; ‘Phe-nominal Women’, a critical essay on the representation of female sexuality in Tamil cinema, Deep Focus, Bangalore.
She has also co-authored a book in Tamil, Akira Kurosawa, and translated the short stories of Satyajit Ray and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other well known authors for various literary Tamil magazines. Her recent book The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction edited by Rakesh Khanna features 17 tales of crime and romance.
Open Space: You are both an artist as well as an activist. How do you reconcile these two roles? Are there occasions of contradiction, or are the contours of your theatre defined by your activism?
Pritham: My theatre is a political stand. I don’t do it for fun. My primary audience is ordinary people and therefore my performance is malleable – it needn’t be on a stage, I can do with minimal props. So I bring into it my personal politics, and my engagement with politics. It isn’t about the apostrophes and exclamations of theatre. What I do has to feel right to me.
Open Space: You have been doing solo theatre for ten years now. What is the response to your theatre – both the themes and the form?
Pritham: The form of my theatre is of storytelling and performance. Given my themes, women have comprised a large part of the audience. I would say the response has been tremendous. What I do is not engage with something completely new or fantastic, but with real and common problems. I try to address these themes positively through this different form.
Open Space: Are your plays script-based, or do you adapt according to contexts of space, audience etc?
Pritham: There is a central storyline, but it is not rigid. The performance changes according to several things like where I’m performing, the expected age group of the audience, who is commissioning me to do it, etc. For instance, Touch Me Not, a play about child sexual abuse that I will be performing at Open Space, can have three or four stories. For instance, a boy being abused by his senior at school, or a girl by a man, and a woman.
I sometimes get commissioned to do plays by NGOs that come with their own agendas. In these cases, since I’m on contract, I might have to miss out on some dimensions, like, say, in Touch Me Not, the politics of pleasure.
Open Space: The other play you will be performing with Open Space is about Dushala. Could you tell us why you chose Dushala?
Pritham: In 2004 the Kuttu Federation had asked me to present something at Kanchipuram. The theme was the Mahabharata and I was given four months. I went through four or five versions of the Mahabharata to find a character that I could use. Women like Amba and Draupadi had already been done. I quite like Iravati Karve’s treatment of Gandhari. But it was through the Ramayana that I encountered Dushala. I went back to the Mahabharata to find her. That was how I came to give this silent woman voice. She is so much a part of it, yet there is hardly any mention of her.
That was also the time when the Bharatiya Janata Party was talking about removing ‘Sind’ from the national anthem, because Sind was now in Pakistan. And Dushala was married to the prince of Sind. So I wrote this play in which Dushala leaves Bharatam the place as well as Bharatam the text.
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