In Memory: Suresh Awasthi 1918-2004

Joan MacIntosh and I arrived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in October 1971. We were fresh off the plane from the USA, newbies in India. A few hours later, after tea and a washup in our hotel, we arrived at the spacious apartment of Shyamanand and Chetna Jalan, five stories above teeming Chowringhee Road in the very center of that maelstrom of a city. Suddenly, into the room flew a skinny man of average height with dancing eyes, fluttering hands, and gales of information. Dr. Suresh Awasthi was birdlike in his staccato speech, his sharp gestures, his piercing eyes, and his overall hyperactivity.

Dr. Suresh Awasthi (Courtesy of Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi)

"You have come here to see theatre and dance?" he asked. "You must see our traditional forms, our folk forms, not just the modern theatre!" Before I could do more than nod my assent, Suresh rushed on. "I will provide you introductions to everyone. I will make out a total program for you." And so he did. In my first four months in India, aside from studying yoga in Madras (now Chennai), Suresh arranged for me to see jatra, yakshagana, pand pather, kathakali, tamasha, bharatanatyam, odissi, Ramlila, raslila, kathak, nautanki, kutiyattam, chhau, kuchipudi . . . and modern Indian theatre. I also met traditional performers, directors and playwrights, journalists and scholars. MacIntosh and I traveled from Kolkata to Mumbai, from Delhi to Kanya Kumari, from Trivandrum to Srinigar.

What kind of man was Suresh Awasthi?

Intense, partisan, generous, outspoken, knowledgeable, stubborn, and well connected to traditional artists.

At that time, at least, many of these traditional artists were village-based. They were isolated. Some forms faced extinction. Suresh Awasthi's 10-year tenure from 1965 to 1975 as General Secretary of India's Sangeet Natak Akademy changed all that. Suresh came from a village in north India. He understood village life. Although he earned a doctorate and headed up All-India Radio for a time, Awasthi never left his village of birth far behind. He never tired of reminding me that India, for all its urban greatness, was also a culture of hundreds of thousands of villages. To the very end of his life, even while suffering from Parkinson's disease, Suresh underwrote the Gram Samskar Nyas, aid to his native village.

Suresh's lifelong task was to reconcile village culture with urban culture in India. This task yielded fruit. Without Awasthi's tireless efforts in the 1960s and '70s, much of what Indians and non-Indians alike treasure about Indian performance would have gone under. Although the Sangeet Natak Akademi never had a great amount of money to give, Suresh knew where to spend it strategically by making key grants to guru (teacher)-artists;by making certain that performances were documented and archived; and by campaigning to involve any who showed interest in the traditional arts.

But even more than preservation, Suresh was the prime mover of the Theatre of Roots movement in Indian theatre. Suresh coined the term, "Theatre of Roots" to describe the work of modern artists who actively incorporated traditional genres in their theatrical productions. These "roots" productions occurred in professional and educational venues, in cities and in villages. Awasthi wanted to put modern artists in touch with their roots. He wanted to make sure that traditional artists were not isolated in their practices, becoming mere living national treasures. The works of innovators such as B.V. Karanth, Kavalam Panikkar, Mohan Agashe, Rattan Thiyam, and others are not conceivable without Awasthi's vision. In the words of Erin Mee, "The roots movement is significant in that it is the first conscious effort to make a body of work that was different from modern European theatre, and different from traditional Indian performance" (2004:12). It was Awasthi who actively brought together traditional and modern performing artists. Some opposed Awasthi's vision as watering down the tradition while not adding anything to the modern. These critics felt that the modern directors were dabbling in rather than mastering the forms they exploited in making their works. Indeed, sometimes this happened. But often the experiments...