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12 Shambuka’s Story Anew C. Basavalingaiah (b. 1977) became involved with drama through Samudaya, a street theater movement begun in 1975 during the Indian Emergency to combine messages of social activism with excitement about new theatrical forms.1 It organized performance festivals (jatras) to foster socio-political awareness among laborers in rural areas. Basavalingaiah entered Samudaya as a student and became a pivotal member of the group. Later, he attended the National School of Drama in Delhi, graduating with a specialization in direction. During his years as director of Rangayana, a dramatic academy in Mysore, he began theatrical work designed to inculcate an early taste for theater in children , a project that led to the Chinnara Mela, a festival in which twenty-five hundred children participated. In addition to Shudra Tapasvi, which has been staged multiple times and won national acclaim, Basavalingaiah has directed many other plays.2 In addition, he has been involved in direction, stage design, and drama criticism. More recently, he has become active in film as well. Sources: Productions of Shudra Tapasvi, Rangayana, Mysore; discussion with cast and director Prasanna, November 15–17, 2002. Interview with Basavalingaiah , January 4, 2005, Bangalore. Basavalingaiah Re-presents Shudra Tapasvi Performance Essay by Paula Richman Valmiki had told Shambuka’s story as an affirmation of caste hierarchy and brahminical privilege, but“Kuvempu”K.V. Puttappa radically transformed the narrative in his 1944 play Shudra Tapasvi [The Shudra Ascetic] by removing the stigma of adharma from Shambuka’s shoulders and showing the respect with which Rama viewed Shambuka. In 1999, the play was revived more than half a century after its initial performance by C. Basavalingaiah. He went one step further in rethinking the relationship between the Shudra tapasvi and the Kshatriya king. The director presented Puttappa’s story about the power 1. This summary of Samudaya is based on Ramesh (2000: 16) and interviews with Basavalingaiah and Prasanna. Samudaya’s earliest play was Prasanna’s Huttava Dadidare, with music by B. V. Karanth, which examined kingship from the perspective of the proletariat. Two early Samudaya plays dealt with the killing of rural Dalit agricultural laborers. 2. Basavalingaiah also directed another major play by Puttappa: Shmashana Kurukshetra (Kurushetra , the Cremation Ground), based on an incident from Mahabharata. The play takes place at midnight after eighteen days of battle, when the Dwapara yuga gives way to the Kali yuga. 136 Stigmatized Characters of tapas performed by a Shudra, using performance styles drawn largely from Shudra folk drama. By doing so, Basavanlingaiah’s production actualized Puttappa ’s principle of respecting cultural acts of “low caste” people. Most stage directors, following the lead of Puttappa himself, viewed Shudra Tapasvi as too static for staging. As the first person to articulate concerns about his play’s stageability, Puttappa himself comments on its shortcomings in the play’s preface, stating, “the play is useless from the point of view of the theater .”3 Several features account for the assessment. First, the play’s main goal is to depict the transformation of a character’s mind—not promising material for an action-oriented medium such as the stage. Second, Shudra Tapasvi contains a number of lengthy speeches and is written for a small cast of all-male characters . Third, the play lacks comic interludes and grand battle scenes to vary the play’s texture. Fourth, Shudra Tapasvi does not contain the songs, dances, and complexity of plot that those attending Kannada plays in the 1940s would have expected—whether in ritual dramas at festivals, spectacles mounted by professional companies, or newly emerging social dramas enacted by dramatic groups at colleges.4 Finally, the play is quite a bit shorter than most performances of its day. The play’s elevated linguistic register also limits its appeal to audiences. Written in a grandiloquent style that features Sanskritized vocabulary, complex word play, and phrases chosen for their musicality and rhythm, the script assumes the listener’s familiarity with high literary style.5 The consensus among most was that Puttappa’s script worked better for readers than directors. That Puttappa saw the play’s ideal audience as a well-read literary connoisseur with the ability to conjure up its incidents and characters in the mind’s eye is indicated by his comment in his preface: “It [Shudra Tapasvi] therefore has to be imaginatively visualized on the screen of one’s mind.”6 Theater director Basavalingaiah conceptualized an original and compelling way to stage Shudra Tapasvi. His production earned acclaim locally...

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