'I have this foot-in-mouth disease'
Years ago, you said that 'thuggishness' was the Shiv Sena's primary objective, adding that they didn't have any causes left. Today, that seems prophetic, because others appear to have cottoned on to that fact. Do you feel vindicated?
I have not changed my stance. It sometimes appears as if I'm always looking for trouble (laughs).
The point is, the Sena has nothing. Forget issues, their only agenda is themselves and how to make more money. I have always maintained that we are allergic to thinking, to confronting this. That is more the pity for all of us. And do you think we have really understood this? They may have broken up, but Raj Thackeray has a tremendous following, and the Maharashtrian constituency will still follow him. He will change his stance any time it suits him.
Whatever you say about the BJP or the RSS -- and God knows I have talked about this before -- you will have to grant that they have an ideology. The Shiv Sena has never had one. You might completely disagree with the RSS ideology, as I do. For instance, (Vinayak Damodar 'Veer') Savarkar is not as simple as the RSS makes him out to be. He is a very complex character.
As was Shivaji, for that matter.
Absolutely. I would use Shivaji as a role model in many ways. He was extremely self-conscious about what he was doing. And these people are completely unaware of that. It's why I find myself always fuming against them. That has now become a standard feature (laughs).
As for feeling vindicated, one of the things I learnt from Cuckold is that there is nothing worse than 'I told you so'. Because the damage is done.
One of the reasons I asked you that question is because writers and poets have, throughout history, taken on the role of commentators. They are the ones others turn to for direction. And we don't have a tradition of writers in India -- at least lately -- willing to take a stand. They rarely go beyond the boundaries set by their texts. You are one of the few who have.
I completely agree. It is true I have this foot-in-mouth disease (laughs) and I might regret it later, because it all comes home eventually.
Would you ever consider working on something as experimental as Bedtime Storyever again?
I would love to. I was recently in Bangalore, where the wife of my friend Shankar Nag -- who died in an accident -- has built a theatre called Rang Shankara. It is an exhilarating space. When you have the right space, the interaction between actors and audience is phenomenal. When I wrote Bedtime Story, one of the things I always wanted to do was to put the chorus -- a very deliberately glib chorus that is taking the audience for a ride -- on a huge swing high above the proscenium. As he got nastier, the swing would come down all the way, extremely threateningly, into the audience itself.
It's like the alienation effect Bertolt Brecht often tried to achieve through a number of devices, to shake an audience.
It is. I, so late in my life, saw that space and said to myself -- what can one not do with a place like this? So, yes, I would like to do something experimental there. I don't warm up to Shakespeare quickly, the way I warm up to, say, (Francois) Rabelais, but every time I read Shakespeare, I can see that this is where you touch your head to his feet. You realiSe there is something phenomenal happening.
When you have the space, you don't have to go in for gimmickry. I would love to do an opera, for instance, but not like a Western opera. After all, we come from a musical tradition.
Interestingly, opera too was initially a lowbrow art form. A lot like our tamasha, at some point.
It has to be, and that is why I would love to do it that way. I must say that we consciously killed the tamasha though. We were so ashamed of it.
Why ashamed?
Because it didn't mind swearing, it was filled with all kinds of humour -- some very low and very dubious, and also extremely pungent. There was also a lot of sexuality in it. Now, the last theatre at Lalbaug (in northcentral Mumbai) has gone. There is no audience. That space has been taken over.
There was never anything clandestine about the tamasha's intentions. Whereas, with dances in Hindi cinema, there's something very peculiar going on. It is, in a sense, so obscene. And it's funny that I should talk about obscene things because I love them, but only when they are done frontally, not under a pretext. If you tell a dirty joke, I will start blushing (smiles), but my books are always full of this kind of thing. I take great pleasure in bawdiness, and where do I get that from? Not Rabelais alone. Why would I deny the tamasha? It is magnificent.